


Incredible, Edible

by rokhal



Series: The Legend of Hillrock Heights [4]
Category: Ghost Rider (Comics), Zebragirl (Webcomic)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Exorcisms, First Aid, Gen, Human Trafficking, Hurt, Hurt Robbie Reyes, Immigration & Emigration, Magic, Murder, No Cannibalism, PBS Frontline Documentary RPF, Robbie straight-up murders a guy in this fic, Spirit of Vengeance, Suicide Attempt, eat the rich
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-02-29 21:26:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18786538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: Teenage human trafficking victims laboring at an Iowa egg plant pray for help from an avenging spirit.They get Robbie.(Or, Robbie learns that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the fan-flashworks challenge "Hungry" and the Birthday Bingo prompt "Breakfast."  
> Scenario ripped wholesale from the PBS Frontline documentary "Trafficked In America."  
> Plot inspired by Rory's Story Cubes (cute little dice with pictures that you use to shake up a new story).

Eli flipped Yegor's glass coffee table with his foot, shattering it into a thousand diamonds. The coke wasn't working and it was pissing him off. He couldn't think properly without it. He had jobs to do, problems to solve.

“Hey, you can't break the boss's furniture, Reyes, that's impolite.” Oleg. Young, skinny, callow. _Nosy._ Why had he never killed Oleg? Well, he would do it now. The coffee table was the kind with a steel rim around the outside that the glass rested in; Eli stretched his thoughts out to it and the steel began to glow orange, a black portal opened where the shattered glass lay. He grabbed Oleg by the tie and flipped him over his shoulder into the void, then dove down after him.

They landed on his favorite bloodstained rock in the desert. The full moon cast the shadow of a saguaro on the altar, a pygmy owl stared down from one arm of the cactus. Eli pinned Oleg by the throat and drew his belt knife, stabbed below his ribs, worked it back and forth between the bones, trying to crack the ribcage so he could cut out his heart.

It didn't cut. Dull. How the fuck was it dull.

He flung it aside, drew his ankle knife. This was dull, too. Oleg lay passive as a corpse, staring up at the stars. Eli tossed the ankle knife, drew his gun, jabbed the barrel beneath the corner of Oleg's jaw. Squeezed the trigger ten times. Jammed.

He felt heat, heard the crackle of flames. Heard a distant whup-whup-whup of a helicopter. Bullet wounds in his chest, his hip.

Eli pulled a crowbar out of thin air, struck Oleg in the face, but instead of shattering, his skull deformed like putty around the metal, springing back into shape as he drew back for another blow, and Eli was running out of time. He struck again and again, cursing. The flames grew hotter, closer. He heard chanting in Spanish. An old hymn he hadn't heard since...since Mom and Dad left.

Suddenly, Oleg sat up, grabbed Eli by the neck. His grip was iron. Eli scratched and kicked him. The altar opened up, a deep well of blackness, and Oleg's eyes glowed red. “Past due,” the thing in Oleg rumbled. And they tipped down into the void, falling forever, burning, his consciousness dissolving like smoke, a confusion of terror and heat and cold, phantom bullet wounds, the helicopter louder and louder, the hymn sung in off-key trembling voices—

Robbie latched onto the hymn and the helicopter noise, hauling himself out of Eli's nightmare. Suddenly he had a body again, a self, his own self. He was sitting crosslegged in the dark, and he couldn't move, but that was fine, because this was a dream, this was a nightmare, and you can't move in nightmares, you just wait for them to be over. The helicopter noise was so close, booming in his skull. All over his body, bullet wounds burned cold, like liquid nitrogen. His eyes opened into a dark room, where a half-dozen boys barely older than Gabe sat around him, singing in Spanish by the flame of a single cigarette lighter.

“ _Come to us, for we hunger and thirst for justice, we hunger and thirst for vengeance. Come to us, o spirit, o avenging spirit, for we are full of grief. Come to us, come to us, come to us...”_

“It's here,” his body said, still in Spanish.

 _What's here?_ Robbie could not move. But it was just a dream. The singers stopped, their eyes wide and shining in the dim light.

“Really?” one of the boys asked. “Are you joking right now?” Weird accent. Everyone had an accent.

His body winced, wrapped his arms around himself, gripping one of the bullet wounds. “I feel it...burning.”

“Oh, shit,” one of the boys said. “Oh shit, this is bad. Why did we mess with this, Santa Muerte isn't a real saint, she's a demon, a pagan goddess, oh, shit, why did we do this.”

The kid in front of Robbie leaned forward, reached out to him. Robbie wanted to draw away, and his body leaned back. He had to concentrate to listen through the horrible noise of the helicopter. “Pablo, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” his body said. “Yeah, hurry, it worked, _it worked,_ where's Carlos' stuff, hurry, I can feel it in me—”

“Right here, right here,” said the other kid, and Robbie was looking down at a crude altar right in front of him, practically between his knees. A little hooded doll made of what looked like chicken bones and a black T-shirt, anointed in blood. A fresh cut on his own left forearm, drying blood all over his right hand. A photograph of a man, a woman, a little girl, and a teenage boy, a family, the boy the same height as his father, all dressed up neatly in button-down shirts or embroidered blouses, all smiling. Green mountains in the background. The kid pointed at the boy. “This is Carlos, this is who died here.” Robbie stared at the photo. High school age. Freshman at most. _You don't have a more recent photo?_ “He was sick, but they wouldn't let him stop working. It's so hot in the barns, and the air is so bad. He couldn't be working, but Mr. Cobar didn't let him stop. He passed out in the middle of the cages. By the time Marco found him, he was all pale and—Enrique told Mr. Cobar to take him to a doctor, but he refused, he—” The kid took a break, a long breath. “He didn't want anyone to find out about us, so he made Carlos sit outside in the cold and he died. He died.”

 _They worked a kid to death?_ The helicopter boomed louder, the bullet wounds burned colder.

His body winced. “Mr. Cobar worked him to death,” it said. Pablo said.

“And he'd do it again. They don't care. They don't let us leave, Sergio said he was going to leave and Mr. Cobar said Mr. Díaz could have somebody back home shoot his dad if he left, and they—they said they'd give us six hundred a week, and they do, but then they take five-fifty to pay off the debt, nobody can leave. They've got people back in the old country, _they have my dad's farm_ , I leave, Dad loses his farm, I came up here to help my family, I _can't_ do that to them, they put our _land_ on the line to pay my way up here, and it was supposed to be a good job, keep my brother and sisters from going hungry again—”

 _They tricked you,_ Robbie realized. _They're using you._ He stood up. Yellow, flickering light flared in the dim space.

The kids in the circle around him scrambled away, _shit oh-shit, Pablo, what the fuck did we do to you, Mother of God protect us—_

What was wrong with them?

He looked around. He was in a single-wide trailer, the floor grubby, bedding piled on the floor. A rustle of movement in the corners—cockroaches. A kitchen with no appliances. No light fixtures in the ceiling, just empty sockets. “Where are you?” he asked.

The kids in the room were backed up against the walls, silent.

He stooped and picked up the picture of Carlos and his family. His hand looked weird. Thin and dry, the bloody skin sunken down between the bones. Just a dream. “Where are you? Where am I right now? I need an address,” Robbie demanded. “This Cobar fucker worked a kid to death. How do I find you?”

“Trillian Farms,” said the kid who'd been closest to Pablo. “Iowa. SR 245.”

Yes. He could show up, wreck the whole place, burn it all... All the kids were still huddled as far away as they could get in the cramped trailer. This was too complicated. Deeds? Farms? “We need to talk,” he insisted. “I can't just wander around on a farm hoping to run into this asshole. We need a plan.”

“Pablo?” asked the brave kid, squinting in the light.

“No, I'm not Pablo,” Robbie said, annoyed. First he'd thought he was Eli, now the other people in his dream thought he was some completely different person. “I'm Robbie. Roberto Reyes—answer the question. What's the address for this trailer? So I can find you again.”

“Is Pablo okay?”

Robbie rolled his eyes, spun around in the dim room. Some of the blankets in the floor had mildew stains. What kind of sadistic skinflint made people live in these conditions? The same kind of people who let a kid die of, what was it, heat stroke? Hypothermia? Both? “I don't know, I'm not Pablo. Address?”

Half the kids shook their heads, but Pablo's friend said, “I don't think it has an address. But the trailers are behind the chicken houses, from the road.”

“Shut up!” the other kids hissed.

“This one's the green-and-white one.”

“Green and white trailer, Trillian Farms, Iowa. SR—what was it?”

“245.”

“SR-245. I'll come for you. We'll talk. Make these guys pay, get your families their farms back.”

“Please let Pablo come back now.”

“I don't have him,” Robbie insisted. “I don't know where he is. I've got to go. We'll talk later. Bye.”

He woke up in the car. He woke up _as_ the car, the night wind humming against his antenna, the freeway rumbling in the distance, the quiet street shining soft in the glow of the insect-choked streetlamps. His engine was cool and still, resting. Usually when he was the car, it was because the Rider was too angry or injured to keep a human form, or he was lying in wait for someone, but to just _be_ the car, drifting in the silence and stillness on a quiet Sunday night, was an unexpected pleasure.

**Where the fuck did you go.**

Robbie roused himself. _What? I was sleeping. I get weird dreams when I take too much melatonin, you must be confused._

Eli was silent, but his agitation wound through the steel. **Where's your body.**

_What?_

**Your body. Your sole useful contribution to this partnership. Where is it.**

_In bed._

**You sure?**

Robbie reached his mind out from the car, back toward the apartment where he'd been sleeping. No echo, no sensation of sweaty bedsheets tangled around his legs. Nothing. _What the fuck._

A rush of alarm, and the car sparked up. His engine revved, warmed. The blower coughed fire. The Rider pushed himself out of the steel of the driver's side door, steel and leather and kevlar, the vents of his skull wide open and spewing flame. He staggered away from the car on shaking legs, patted himself down. _Eli, can you port me back to my room._

**And here I thought we were starting divorce proceedings.**

_Yes. Because you are a manipulative, murderous asshole. But I would really appreciate it if you would port me back into my room please._

**Oh, he said please.**

_I can just pull the bars out and climb in the window—_

**Fire in the hole.** The Rider dropped down through the asphalt and emerged on Robbie's bed. He rolled off and snuffed out. Robbie found himself naked in his bedroom. He flicked on the bedside lamp. The T-shirt and boxers he'd gone to sleep in lay tangled in his sheets, as though he'd simply disappeared while wearing them.

He stared down at them for a long time. Put them back on, thinking.

He opened the top drawer on his desk and dug out his old English notebook where he kept all his notes on the surgeon he and Eli had killed that fall. His “serial-killer scrapbook.” Turned to a blank page, scrawled down, “Trillian Farms, SR-245, Iowa.”

**Fuck is that?**

_From my dream. Remember? It was weird. I've got to look it up in the morning, I'm not sure it was just a dream._

**What dream? All I remember is finally putting a cap in Oleg, like I should have twenty years ago—**

_Oh, bullshit. That was your version of the “giving a public speech while naked” nightmare. I mean the trailer, with the kids._

Silence. Then, **Oh, of course.** _ **That**_ **dream. The trailer and the kids. Go on.**

Eli hadn't dreamed that dream.

Robbie's body had disappeared.

The dream, now that he was awake and thinking about it, was freaky and horrible: the kids were crammed together in a vermin-infested trailer meant for three people; they gave him a story straight out of a Dickens novel; they'd fucking, _summoned_ Robbie like he was a demon, _looked_ at him like he was a demon, they'd been praying to Santa Muerte apparently, Robbie had—oh, shit, he'd possessed Pablo—like a demon—

Robbie put the notebook away, sat on the bed, and stared at his hands. His nails, stained black around the edges where the engine grease never fully scrubbed out. His fingerprints, the little nicks and burn scars and bruises on his forearms. His stomach growled. He felt real. He had a job and a lease and everything. He was pretty sure that, by definition, a ghost couldn't hold down a job. He stretched out his mind to the car, and that felt real, too, the wind on his body panels and the grit under his tires; that didn't mean anything, though, he just had a, a psychic link to the car, that was _fine,_ plenty of people had psychic links to other people, and, like, pets, and magical artifacts.

He dug his plastic rosary out of his bedside table, with the paper print-out on how to say the Hail Mary. Started counting beads and saying prayers. It was long enough for his racing heart to slow, repetitive enough to bore Eli into leaving him alone, and had just enough variety to keep him from zoning out. It probably wasn't right to think about prayer that way, but, whatever. At least he wasn't praying to Santa Muerte to summon a demon.

* * *

 

Monday afternoon, after getting home from the shop, he woke up his laptop, did the dance with the VPN and the secure search, and looked up Trillian Farms. Found the map. It was so tempting to Google the place; DuckDuckGo's maps were kind of cludgy.

Trillian Farms was a real company, an egg farm, huge sheds bigger than warehouses. One of its facilities sat off State Route 245 in Iowa.

“Not a dream,” Robbie muttered.

There were no trailers on the map behind the sheds. He wondered if it was worth going to Google Maps for the satellite view.

He had work Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday the rest of the week. Sunday he planned to take Gabe to the library. The best time to go out there was tomorrow while Gabe was at school. That meant he needed Eli. And—he'd promised the kids he'd make their captors pay. If Eli thought that meant killing someone, he'd help. Eli was a junkie, he'd do anything for a kill. “In that weird dream last night, someone killed an innocent kid in Iowa,” Robbie said. “Like a vision. I want to go there to check it out.”

 **Oh, you need my help now. You found a murder for** _**you.** _ **Because we only get to kill** _**your** _ **enemies. Suddenly, Uncle Eli is your best friend again.**

_Do you want to kill somebody or not?_

**And when it turns out to be “oops, just a normal dream, sorry, Eli—”**

_Nobody's forcing you. But I'm not sure enough about it to physically drive to Iowa to talk to these guys._

Silence. But Robbie knew he'd won.

* * *

 

It was three in the afternoon. Gabe wasn't due to get out of the Development Center until four-thirty. Over in Iowa, it was seven PM, and hopefully the kids from the trailer would be back and free to talk.

Whenever Eli decided to open a portal to someplace he was unfamiliar with, Robbie had to research the location. Google Earth was their friend here, even though it did save all Robbie's search data until the end of time. Google _Street View_ was _really_ their friend. That one time they'd used sat-view to open a portal, popped into existence a thousand feet above the Angeles National Forest, and briefly pancaked the Charger on the rocks was...memorable. So they remembered not to do that again.

Robbie dropped Google Maps down to street view, thirty miles up the road from the chicken houses at a gravel access road that where it branched off State Route 245. He fixed the images in his brain with five minutes of staring and meditation, got in the car, and drove off to the garbage alley between the hair salon and the auto parts store to burn up.

Robbie was a mechanic with anger management problems, and Eli was the ghost of a hitman who’d also practiced Satanism and serial killing. The car was a 1969 Dodge Charger outfitted with a blown, naturally aspirated 426 cubic inch Hemi V-8. Last spring, mercenaries with helicopters and automatic rifles had filled Robbie full of bullets and set him and the car on fire. The Rider had risen from the flames: Robbie’s corpse and Eli’s ghost and all the steel and power of the car, shrieking wordless fury with the rumble and whine of its engine, vengeful, feral, unstoppable. He’d avenged Robbie’s death. Robbie had woken whole, in bed, the next morning. And he’d kept going to work and school and helping Gabe with his homework and going to Gabe’s appointments with the pediatric psychiatrists and physiotherapists, earning money and paying bills, but still, ever since, he was part of the Rider and the Rider was part of him. And so, unfortunately, was Eli.

Some days it was hard to burn up. Some days he had to sit in the car for minutes at a time, waiting for the motor to warm, revving the engine, running over a carefully-chosen selection of wrongs in his mind to get angry at. Carefully-chosen, because some grudges he was saving for a special occasion. Robbie's anger was the combustion that gave the Rider life, and it could be difficult to use unless his anger was using him. Today, he sat in the car, goosed the throttle a little, and as the engine snarled and the blower screamed, he pictured the kids in the filthy trailer:, the terrified faces in the firelight, Pablo's hand smeared with the blood from a self-inflicted wound; Carlos with his family in the photograph, smiling, Gabe's age. The engine exploded, fire poured out through the vents and lights and tailpipes and blower, his body burned away down to bone and metal. The Rider howled the blower's scream, fire spewing from his vents and teeth. Floored the gas while standing on the brake pedal, setting the rear tires spinning in place, the back of the car skidding from side to side over the asphalt.

**Whoa Nelly.**

_Go. Go, go!_

Eli opened the portal they'd planned that afternoon, a black hole ringed in fire, just in front of their wheels. The Rider let off the brake and they rocketed into it.

Blackness stretched long seconds. Their flames jetted out endlessly into the void. Within the car, the Rider waited, foot hard on the gas pedal, grinding his teeth and spitting molten steel.

They emerged in more darkness, but now the headlights struck road before them, fencing to either side. They shot off the road over the embankment, melted through barbed-wire, carved a great burning scar on the earth at a mile a second. _Okay. Road, road. SR 245._ Robbie fought for control—not against Eli, but against _himself,_ his own anger. He couldn't feel Eli trying to drive at all, but Robbie could barely think straight. _Road. Road. Thirty miles. Back on the road. We can't go after Carlos' killer now, that comes later! Later!_

**You're talking to yourself. You're all pumped up to get yourself exorcised and you're already talking to yourself.**

_Later,_ Robbie told himself desperately, and he managed to steer the car back onto the road, line it up in the correct lane, and snuff out. Panted out the exhaust from his lungs. Slowed the car to a legal fifty-five miles an hour.

The dark stretched out endlessly to each side of the road. Where his headlights struck, everything beyond the road was flat, square: fences, soil raked up into long rows. White. Robbie caught his breath and slowed further.

No stars glittered from the black sky, but a faint bright haze glowed softly in the distance: city lights where they reached the underside of the clouds. On the ground and crusted on each verge of the roadway: snow. Grids of snow: fences, ditches, the corduroy texture of plowed earth. Harsh blue and yellow lights to the right of him illuminated a ranch house and a pole barn, a quarter mile from the road, surrounded by nothing. A similar house house behind him to the left. A hulking, unidentifiable machine outlined in his headlamps beside the road, armed with banks and banks of red-painted blades. Everything capped in snow.

Iowa hadn't looked like this on Google Street View.

The road was cold under his tires, the rubber felt stiff and a bit numb. The radiator and the intercooler chilled as the air flowed between their vanes. The oxygen reaching the engine was dense, giving a fast hard burn; the boost from the blower was almost too much. The thermostat started to drop after just minutes, the water pump slowed. The air coming through the cabin vents was colder than the inside of his freezer at home, and Robbie turned on the heater for the first time in his life. Atmospheric air tingled through the heater block. The car had an ice-cream headache.

He saw more lamps in the distance, high overhead, illuminating big white rectangles. Cruised toward them. Slowed and turned at the concrete sign by the road, “Trillian Farms” in green and white, dimly lit by a canister lamp half-swallowed in snow.

The moment his front tires crossed the edge of the main road onto the paved driveway, they lost traction. The car understeered and almost smashed against the unyielding Trillian sign, a fine entrance for the Ghost Rider. Eli grabbed control of the car, slammed on the brakes, and sparked up enough power to phase the wheels through the thin crust of ice on the road until the rubber bit deep into the brittle asphalt. They stopped. Reversed out of the ditch and back onto the driveway.

Robbie panted, jittery. He was a good driver. He barely had to cheat at street racing. He had a damn 4.7 Uber rating. He felt like he'd just put his foot right through a ladder.

 **The fuck you think was gonna happen, taking a curve at twenty miles an hour in a rear-wheel-drive on black ice? Jesus, kid—oh. Oh! Gah-ha! You don't know.** _**Anything** _ **about winter. You have never. This is the first time. You're nineteen years old, going,** _**the fuck is this white stuff everywhere,** _ **oh, this is the stuff of Saturday Night Live skits, kid. You. You can't.**

 _I forgot about the snow thing,_ Robbie thought, grinding his teeth. He took over control of the car, concentrated to keep the tires half-way phased through the pavement without ripping them apart. He usually just did this for a second at a time, to keep his front tires biting on hard curves. This was going to get old quick.

 **Snow thing. The** _**snow thing!** _

Trillian Farms had a long driveway, about two blocks worth of empty road flanked by flat white fields and low straight barbed-wire fences that Robbie could slip right through without even scratching his jacket. Meant to keep cows out, not people. At the end of the driveway, though, were two security huts, a steel gate, and a built-up chainlink fence that stretched the width of the complex. At every corner of the tall steel barns barns shone bright security lights. Plumes of steam rose from huge vents in the sides. Robbie didn’t fancy his odds of getting through security from the front. _Hey, I’m a Farming student at Iowa State University, I was hoping I could randomly drop by to talk to your employees. No, thanks, I don’t need a tour because chickens are revolting. Hey, I’m Juan Rivera from California, I was just passing through in my non-winterized collectible car and thought I’d come catch up with my cousin Pablo. No I can’t remember his last name, who keeps track of that? I want to talk to Cousin Pablo._

He pulled cautiously back onto the plowed-clean road and continued up SR 245. Turned at a cross street, passed the world’s tiniest church and a single ranch house. Stared across the snowy void at the lights of the chicken farm. The fence, so imposing from the front, cut off abruptly at its sides. Just decorative, apparently. Behind the complex, a stand of leafless trees broke up the lights.

“Behind the chicken-houses,” the kid had said. Well. He'd already found a farm at SR 245, called Trillian. Now he would find a green-and-white single-wide trailer behind the chicken-houses.

Robbie parked in the church parking lot. Put the radio on, flipped the little lever underneath so Eli could listen to police chatter for him. Got out of the car and gasped.

It hurt to breathe. The cold cut through the canvas tops and rubber soles of his Converse. He zipped his jacket up to the throat and pulled his hood over his head. His thin leather driving gloves were icy around his fingers. Through the chill, he picked up a sour smell on the air. Not quite rot.

He’d have to hurry.

He stared out across the black expanse, left the car, and approached the field. Padded over the dry grasses that stuck up through the powdery snow. It chilled his ankles, stuck to his socks. The farm couldn't be that far.

He ducked between the wires of the fence and jogged off over the field.

It was rough going. His shoes slipped over the snow, and the frozen, wrinkled field jabbed up into them. His toes first hurt, then went numb. He tripped, a rock or another frozen groove in the earth, and he fell and caught himself on his hands; his palms burned. His nose-hairs stuck together every time he inhaled. His leather jacket shrugged off the light wind, but the cold seeped through it slowly, steadily. The sour smell grew stronger.

The lights looked no closer than when he'd started. He turned and looked back at the car, still running, lights illuminating his path. The car looked a block or two away. He felt like he'd been walking ten minutes.

Robbie pulled the sleeves of his hoodie down over his hands and kept moving, jogging more carefully, still staggering now and then on the uneven ground. He crossed a frozen-over irrigation ditch lined with leafless shrubs and dried thistles. He kept moving on freezing, bruised feet toward the distant lights, the dark trees. At last he reached the sudden edge of the woods, a surveyor-straight line where the cultivated field ended.

He looked over his shoulder and saw the car's headlights, very small, watching him in the distance. Then he picked his way through the dark, between the low branches. His ankles burned with melted snow. Every time he breathed, his breath shuddered, and not with the vibration of his engine: all his muscles were so tense against the cold that he couldn't stop shaking.

He saw a broad square shadow looming in front of him, and he flashed his phone at it. Dropped it in the snow, had to kneel down and dig for it with numb fingers. He got the flashlight app running again, his night vision ruined by the bright screen, and shone it on the shadow: a single-wide trailer. White siding, red decorative skirting around the roof. Windows blocked off inside with blankets.

A trailer. Not the right one.

He circled the trailer, found a track in the snow where feet had packed it down into rutted ice: slick, but less snow to cake onto his cotton socks. He followed the track. Passed another trailer, white with gray trim, and a third, aqua with white trim. The green and white trailer.

He found the rickety metal stairs and knocked on the door.

Nothing. No light showed behind the covered windows.

It was cold, it was impossibly fucking cold, and Robbie wanted to bounce on his toes but he couldn't really feel his feet except for the itching and burning from the snow against his ankles. He banged on the door one more time, then growled and tried the knob. Open. He got out his phone for the flashlight and pushed his way in.

There was the narrow dark space from his dream, the floor crowded with blankets. A foot or so between each crude bedroll, a sad attempt at separating sleeping spaces. The trailer smelled like a backed-up toilet, and also the same sour smell from outside. He saw feathers dotting every surface, white and crusty. A half-used case of bottled water, partly frozen. “Hello?” he called in Spanish. “Is anybody here?”

Nothing.

He'd have to leave a note. He didn't have any paper on him—the Uber forums said to always carry a notepad, which he never did—but he did have a white grease-marker he used when working on timing belts and such in the shop. He picked his way between the beds to the bathroom.

The sewage smell was very bad here. Nothing in the toilet bowl, not even water. A five-gallon bucket sat beside the toilet, a sheet of plastic—old wrapping for a previous case of bottled water—draped over its mouth. This was the source of the smell. Robbie tried the faucet at the sink. Nothing. A water bottle and a grimy piece of soap sat on the counter. There were no light bulbs in the vanity over the sink, but at this point Robbie was willing to bet they wouldn't light up if they'd been there.

Who the fuck makes people live like this?

The same fuck who makes a sick kid work until he gets heat exhaustion and then leaves him alone outside in sub-freezing weather.

He braced his hands against the sink and panted. Far away across the field, his engine revved and his blower whined, and the noise and fumes began to pour from his throat. He saw his bad eye glowing in the mirror. _Later. Later._ Rein it in. These poor kids. He had to talk to them. He had to help them. He couldn't just break and burn shit because he was pissed off.

The engine fumes took the edge off the sewage smell, and Robbie calmed enough to fish the grease-marker out of his pocket and wrote on the mirror.

_555-555-5555_

_Llámame_

_-Robbie_

He noticed something smeared on the mirror when he finished and he squinted in the light of the phone. Blood. One of his palms was bleeding from when he'd tripped in the field—the ground was frozen so hard it had cut through his glove. He hadn't imagined that was possible. What the hell, America. This was some Jack London bullshit.

Which meant he'd just bled all over the trailer. He wiped at the counter with a paper towel from the roll that sat on the toilet tank, got rid of some of the blood, but the dried parts weren't coming off. At least now he could home in on the blood if he had to port over here later.

**Kid, quit playing house and get back here. We got cops.**

Robbie jumped. Hustled outside, shut the door, stopped by a tree to smear some more blood on the trunk. Across the field, he saw the Charger's headlights, and right beside it, the blue-and-white strobing of a light bar. _What, already? I'm not doing anything!_

**Guards at the farm thought we were “driving suspiciously.” Sheriff sent a deputy. Concierge service! It's like dealing with the Italians back in Jersey!**

_You couldn't have told me before they were right on our ass?_ Robbie demanded.

**You were busy. I didn't want to disrupt your process.**

Cops. They were practically touching the car. Robbie hyperventilated, his breath sweet with exhaust fumes and steaming in the frigid air, fanning the heat in his lungs and the hammering panic in his heart until his body burned again to steel and bone. He felt for the car in his mind and dropped through the darkness under his feet. Hauled out of the upholstery, into the driver's seat.

A young cop bundled up in a mask and thick gloves was pointing a high-powered flashlight into his backseat. The Charger revved, shot fire in all directions. The cop dove backward. The Rider shifted to Reverse and floored it out of the church parking lot, back onto the county road, screaming off into the night at two hundred and fifty miles an hour, leaving streaks of flame on the cold tarmac. _Get us out. Get us out._

Eli opened a portal and they dropped down through it onto I-5, heat and daylight again, three thirty in the afternoon. The Rider pumped the brakes and wove through traffic, slowing to two hundred, one-fifty, seventy. They snuffed out and drove home.

That afternoon, Gabe had math and geology to catch up on after spending all day in physiotherapy and basic finance at the development center. His math worksheets from his eighth-grade classes _still_ didn't give him enough space to show his work, so Robbie re-copied the problems onto some of the butcher paper Gabe used for drawing superheroes. This was a basic fucking accommodation. He could almost see Mrs. Jules pitching a fit about non-standard worksheet paper, and it was getting harder and harder to stifle the urge to break her hands with the stupid glass paperweights in her office, see how small _she_ could write then. While Robbie re-copied the math worksheet, Gabe made himself flashcards on geology, using full sheets of copy paper. He stood plastic army-men on his open text-book to mark diagrams and paragraphs to stop himself from writing anything twice.

Gabe was fourteen. Some of the kids in that trailer looked as young and skinny as he did. Robbie felt his lungs heating, and he shook his head hard and stared out the bars on the apartment's front window.

The kids in the trailer couldn't see out their windows because it was too cold to let the blankets down.

“How was school, buddy?” Robbie asked, his voice rough.

“Good,” Gabe said, reaching for a red crayon to add jagged plumes of fire to a volcano. “I saw Marcus and Emily. Emily likes comics a lot. I want to give her some.”

“Do you think you'll miss your comics later?”

Gabe lifted his head and raised his eyebrows. “I won't give her my _favorites._ I'll _borrow_ her my favorites.”

And people told him Gabe was an actual angel. Robbie snorted softly.

“I like Emily and Marcus and Mateo and Roslyn,” Gabe remarked. Roslyn, she was new. Robbie had met Mateo; he was Gabe's friend from middle-school. “They're really nice. I wish we all got to go to the same school all the time.”

Robbie was so wrapped up in Gabe, helping Gabe navigate the wider world, that he forgot sometimes about all the other kids at the center and at school. Gabe wasn't like that. Gabe liked people, Gabe paid attention. This was why Gabe had more friends after three months at Robbie's old middle school than Robbie had made in three years. “You're right,” he said. “That would be pretty cool.”

Robbie waited for a call all night, and Wednesday. Drove Uber all Wednesday night, made out decently well driving people home from sports bars after midnight. Thursday, after seeing Gabe off to school, he took Benadryl and melatonin and slept all day with a blanket over his bedroom window. Still no calls. Friday, a serpentine belt change and a mysterious squeaking noise at the auto shop, cook dinner, nap, then Uber until three; Saturday, No-Doze, fifteen oil changes, a nest of dead mice in a Ranger's air intake, Gabe got to make dinner, nap, Uber till three again. No calls.

Sunday, Gabe made microwave-scrambled eggs with toast for breakfast. Gabe's cooking seemed to be an exercise in finding out how much cheese could one fit into a single meal and keep it edible. They hadn't yet hit the limit. “This is real tasty,” Robbie said, scooping the last globs of egg out of the bottom of his bowl. Strings of cheese dangled off his fork and he scraped it clean with his teeth. He looked at the empty egg carton in the trash can. Eggs were cheap, filling. You could make three good meals for two people with a carton that cost less than three dollars. Robbie didn't get sick of eggs, and Gabe didn't have trouble chewing them. Eggs were a godsend. Still. He thought of the huge white sheds back in Iowa. The feathers and the sour smell in the trailer.

“Thank-you Robbie, I love cooking,” Gabe said, and Robbie grinned back at him.

As promised, he took Gabe to the library. Sundays, a group of seniors came in to read to the kids, and Gabe liked to listen, power chair parked behind the ring of smaller kids on the floor. Robbie tried to pay attention, some Mayan folktale, but he fell asleep against one of the shelves. A librarian woke him up at four in the afternoon. Gabe had a pile of books on his lap, some from the children's section and one huge coffee-table-book on muscle cars. “I'm so sorry,” Robbie said, shoving himself to his feet and staggering as all the blood rushed out of his head. “I'm so—Gabe, are you okay? Are you hungry?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said.

“Shi—uh, come on, let's go, let's check out your books and go get food, I'm sorry—”

“Can we get ice cream?” Gabe interrupted. His eyes were wide. Robbie's stomach growled.

“Yeah, bud, we'll go get some ice cream. But then I gotta make peas, okay? Peas and butter sauce—ice cream's not dinner—”

“Yay, ice cream! Robbie-Robbie, let's go drive in our car and get ice cream!”

“You got it.”

At eight pm after a balanced dinner of ice cream and buttered peas, Robbie put Gabe to bed and drove out to the alley he and Eli liked to port from. _Take us to Iowa. It's midnight back East, the kids should be there this time._

They burned up and ported out. The same long silent trip through the black void, this time emerging in the church parking lot. The Rider stared across the snowy field at the copse of trees, felt for the blood Robbie had left days ago. Found the palm-print on the tree-trunk outside the trailer.

**Come on. Pop into the bathroom. Show 'em we're the real deal.**

Robbie focused hard on the blood on the tree.

 **You're no fun.** Eli launched them. The Rider rolled down out of the dark at the foot of the bare tree and snuffed out.

It was even colder tonight, and Robbie hadn't thought that was possible. The trailer was still pitch-black, silent. He looked up.

The sky was clear this time. Stars burned down overhead, blue and pink and yellow, so thick he couldn't see constellations, just thousands and thousands of tiny lights receding into the sharp velvet black. He knew the stars were supposed to be better away from cities. But he'd never imagined this.

His toes burned in the cold and he looked down and picked his way to the stairs of the trailer. Knocked on the door. Waited thirty seconds, muscles already locking up from the cold, and knocked again.

A kid a year or two younger than him cracked the door. The air from the trailer was warm, steaming faintly in the night. Body heat. The kid shined a flashlight in his face.

“I'm Roberto Reyes,” Robbie said. “I know it's late. Sorry. Did you get my message?”

The light wavered a bit. Then the door slammed. Robbie saw the light dancing at the corners of the blankets. Someone lifted a blanket at one of the other windows and stared out at him. Robbie paced in the snow a few minutes, getting powder melted to his socks. He already hated that feeling. He banged on the door again. “I said I'd be back to talk with you. Can I please come in? It's really cold out here.”

The door cracked open again. “You're Roberto Reyes?” a kid demanded. The same weird accent from the dream. The voice sounded familiar, it could have been Pablo's friend.

“I am,” Robbie said. “How's Pablo? Is he okay?”

The door slammed again.

Robbie ground his teeth. “You want your families' farms back, right?” he demanded through the closed aluminum panel. “You want justice for Carlos? Well, I won't know how to do that if we don't talk, and I think I'm gonna lose some toes if you don't let me in. I'll go if you want, but you seemed pretty desperate last week.” He wrapped his icy fingers around his own wrists and stomped in tight circles in the snow.

The door opened again. “Come in,” said Pablo's friend, and Robbie rushed up the stairs into the stinking trailer.

It was still cold inside, but only half as bad as last time. Robbie still shivered. His leather jacket was the same temperature as the outside air, and it was still sucking heat from his body.

The kids looked to be sleeping in their clothes. The empty trailer had seemed crowded enough, but now it was more crowded: ten people, rows of shoes stacked up against the walls, a new case of water, a sack of apples. The sour smell was stronger than last time. Feathers everywhere, still. Someone had stuck the flashlight into a knot of wire hanging from the ceiling, so the light bounced down somewhat evenly through the living room of the trailer.

One of the kids pushed through the group toward Robbie. He was short, and his untrimmed facial hair was fuller than the others'. Pablo's friend—tall, hooked nose, longish hair—put out one arm to stop him, but the shorter kid shook his head. “Marvin, stop.” _**Marvin?**_ “I summoned him, I want to talk to him.”

 _You didn't “summon” me,_ Robbie wanted to say. _I dreamed about you._ But he knew that wasn't true. He swallowed. “Pablo?”

“Yeah.” Pablo stared him in the eyes. Reached out slowly and poked him in the chest. He looked puzzled. Held out his hand for a handshake, and when Robbie shook it, he rubbed his thumb hard over Robbie's skin. “You don't feel dead.”

“I'm not,” Robbie said, staring at the bottled water. “Tell me about this place. Who's in charge? Who did this to you?”

“You can't be Roberto Reyes,” Pablo said, dropping his hand.

Marvin shoved him back. “We're sorry. Don't tell Mr. Díaz, we were just being stupid, messing around with black magic, we know it's not real—”

“I _am,_ ” Robbie insisted. “I saw you all in my dream. I came to your trailer on Tuesday, gave you my phone number.” **Heh-heh. Show your teeth, boy.** “I dreamed you were calling for an avenging spirit, and—I didn't mean to hurt you, Pablo, I didn't understand what was happening. But whoever tricked you and trapped you up here, and _worked a kid to death,_ they are _scum,_ they are _killers and slavers,_ they have to _pay_ , suffer like you and Carlos suffered, they killed someone _innocent_ , I saw your _blood_ , Pablo, don't _fucking_ tell me you were just messing around.” He stopped himself, took a deep breath. Everyone had backed as far away from him as they could get, and he noticed that he was blocking the only door out of the trailer. All he could smell was gasoline fumes, a relief. “You wanted an avenging spirit. I'm a Ghost Rider, that's what we do. Tell me how to do it or I'll do it myself.” He stepped away from the door. Sat crosslegged in the walking-path that lead to the bathroom, and pulled out his phone to take notes. “Who's in charge of this place? How do we fix this?”

Pablo and Marvin sat down in front of him—slowly, five feet away. “Mr. Díaz is a labor contractor for Trillian. He has recruiting agents back home in Guatemala. He and his sons supervise the work here...”

* * *

 

They'd grown up on farms and small towns in Guatemala, all within fifty miles of each-other. Cane sugar was the major cash crop, but cash was hard to come by in an economy upset by narcotraffic and political violence; every single one of them had gone hungry when their parents couldn't convert their sugar or coffee into cash to buy food.

Mr. Díaz had also grown up in Guatemala. He had friends and agents all over. Whenever they heard of a boy who wanted to travel North to the United States to send home money to his family—expensive as the US was, it was swimming in cash—Díaz's agents made an offer. Fifteen-thousand dollars—or ten, or twenty, or five, or however much they could get—and Mr. Díaz would arrange the trip, and a sponsor and a good job once the boy got through the border.

The families, as mentioned before, had very little liquid cash and could not pay for their sons' passage north. Very well, said the agents. Give us the deed to your farm as collateral. Your son can repay your debt when he has his new job in the US. And so, lacking liquid cash and desperate for money to buy food staples, equipment, schooling, and other necessities of life, the families mortgaged their land, the most valuable thing they owned, to Mr. Díaz's agents, and let their eager sons hop the train North.

It was a hard journey, riding the top of a freight train in the tropical sun. They got a cold welcome past the Border: picked up and detained in chilly warehouses, sorted in pens like cattle. Some stayed a few days, others a few weeks. Their release came when a government agent told them their aunt or uncle in the US had called to sponsor them. The government put them on a plane and they got off in Iowa, met a woman who could have been their aunt as far as the government was concerned; really, she worked for Mr. Díaz. She ushered them into vans and drove for hours between the flat checkered fields to drop them off at their trailers, where they would live while they worked on the farm. They thought they'd pay off their debts in a year or two, pool their cooking, eat cheap, and send money home each month for their families to live on and re-invest in their farms. They knew the work would be hard, and they were ready: that was what you did when you wanted something from life, you took a risk and you sacrificed and you worked for it, and then you got your reward.

The farm did not reward. It took and it took.

They worked in the chicken houses from eight in the morning until ten at night, walking between stacked rows of small, packed, stinking cages. Keeping the eggs rolling. Yanking birds out of cages and stuffing them into other cages for culling. Reaching into yet other cages and yanking out birds that had fallen dead. Gentleness was impossible, working at the speed the supervisors demanded; gentleness would be meaningless in the face of the cruelty of the hens' existence. One of the light duties, one they angled for because it was a chance to sit and an escape from the cage-rows, was to grab pullets by their necks and put their upper jaw into the burning hot guillotine that cropped their beaks, to keep the hens from cannibalizing each-other in the close quarters.

The din and stink of the hens was incredible. The air was oppressive, hot and humid and thick with feathers and feces and ammonia. Protective suits, they could buy from the farm. Eye-goggles, too: buy them from the farm. Leather gloves: buy them from the farm.

They cooked food on their own time. Mr. Cobar or Mr. Díaz Junior ferried a few of them into town once a week to go shopping, and they had a communal cooking pit in the woods between the trailers. There wasn't much they could cook there. They usually managed to eat twice a day. While working, they went drank canned energy drinks on irregular, five minute breaks. Before working, they had to take a decontamination shower before putting on their work gear, to avoid introducing diseases to the chickens. After work, no shower. “Shower in your trailers,” Cobar said, ignoring the fact that there was no running water in the trailers.

No one had called Robbie back, partly because they were terrified from finding mysterious streaks of blood on their mirror two days after they'd summoned a vengeance spirit who'd possessed Pablo and left him in a coma for an hour, and partly because those of them who still had phones had no way to charge them.

They got paid once a week. Like Marvin had said: a lump sum on their debit cards, nine-tenths of it withheld to pay down their families' debts. They never got paystubs. They never got any paperwork to show what they still owed on their debt. They had to trust Mr. Díaz's word.

Everybody worked. If they didn't make quota, one of Mr. Díaz's agents might call their families. He had people everywhere back home, a lot of them bad people. He had American money, which stretched a long way in Guatemala. When Rodrigo refused to work for what the plant paid, Mr. Díaz Junior threatened to have Rodrigo's father shot.

It was thirty miles to the nearest town.

Mr. Cobar was one of two supervisors for the chicken house Carlos had worked in. He was thirty or forty, short, wore an ostrich band around his stetson. Drove a white Chevy Silverado. Lived somewhere close to the farm: a little gray ranch house on the way to town where his own kids kept a few cows and sheep. Mr. Cobar worked for Mr. Díaz. As far as the kids in the trailer were concerned, they all worked for Mr. Díaz, but he didn't own the chicken houses. Trillian Farms, according to a discrete search on Robbie's phone, belonged to Michael DeCuster. Robbie couldn't find anything on Mike, but when he searched “DeCuster eggs,” some old guy named Jack DeCuster came up in a bunch of news clips, testifying to Congress about a salmonella outbreak originating from one of his egg farms in the '90s. He had large glasses, a receding chin, and deep lines at the corners of his nose and mouth: a wrinkled and unrepentant turtle.

“This is important,” Robbie said, squinting in the dark after the blue glow of his phone screen. “After Carlos died. Did the cops come? Did anyone come around asking questions? Did anything change?”

The kids looked at each-other. “No,” Marvin said at last. “It was like Carlos disappeared. And we knew if they wanted, they could do it to anyone. No one's watching out for us. That's why Pablo prayed to Santa Muerte.”

* * *

 

Crooks and campers lived by the saying, “Don't shit where you eat.” It was wisdom Eli had attempted to impart to Robbie, though as far as Robbie could gather, Eli had regularly flubbed this rule while he'd been alive. It meant that when Robbie had decided to hunt down and kill a Los Angeles trauma surgeon who had abused and murdered his fiance, he and Eli had taken almost a month to devise a perfect murder. The papers still disagreed on whether the missing surgeon had faked his death.

Robbie and Eli didn't “eat” in Iowa.

The off-set time zone worked in their favor: late at night in California, when Robbie might be heading out to pick up Uber pax, was the small hours of the morning in Iowa. No one was awake. The hens were asleep, so the chicken houses were empty of people. There were few interior cameras: concern about internal blackmail, fines for harboring illegal aliens, leaks to animal rights groups and such. Better not to acquire inconvenient information in the first place.

The Rider could home in on Robbie or Eli's blood and transport himself to it with pinpoint accuracy, blind. This was how he could always port back to the car, or Canelo's auto shop, or Robbie's bedroom. Now he could port to the green and white trailer. Robbie had Marvin flick a bit of paper with a dot of blood on it under the farm's office door.

On a Tuesday night when Robbie should have been carrying passengers, the Rider ported into the office and snuffed out into Robbie. Robbie shielded his face from the webcam on the office computer and covered it with a post-it note. Used a cheap USB drive to install a worm on the office computer. He'd bought the worm last month from a real hacker, some Darknet black hat. Once an authorized user logged on, the worm could let Robbie remotely access the machine's files at his leisure. He hadn't thought he'd use it again after hacking the hospital, but it was so handy.

**Careful, kid, that's how you get an MO.**

Over the next week, he studied the address book, records, payments. Not much on Mr. Díaz, Mr. Cobar's boss: he was considered a contractor, not an employee of the company, and the kids and supervisors he provided were a step further removed. Instead, he found reams and reams of incomprehensible spreadsheets about commodities prices and futures and feed compositions and culling age and chicken production statistics and genetics. Weird chemicals that, when Robbie looked them up online, people couldn't agree on whether they were antibiotics or not.

He found something that passed for an organizational chart.

He found some mailing addresses, several for Mike DeCuster.

* * *

 

Six forty-five in the morning, and oncoming dawn obscured the stars in a haze of blue-green twilight, making the snowy fields glow faintly. Fernando Cobar cruised down the straight flat road toward Trillian Farms, power poles flick-flick-flicking by on his right. He had to get to work before the laborers. There was paperwork in the office, production statistics to review, tasks to coordinate. He had to walk the rows, check the conveyor belts, mix the feed. It was a shit job but it put food on the table.

Iowa was square, endless, flat. In the winter, you could see the deer crossing the road from half a mile off. Driving did not require great attention, other than to keep his Silverado's wheels in the dry ruts where previous vehicles had passed, so as not to wander into ice or drifted snow.

There were headlights facing him in his lane.

He watched them. Was it a trick of perspective? They drew close, faster than he expected: no, they were definitely in the right-side lane, the wrong lane, facing him: small round old-fashioned headlights, a broad black car gleaming with chrome, coming up fast. He flashed his high-beams and they flashed theirs back.

He ground his teeth. Let off the gas, eased his way over the low mound of snow dividing the road to the other lane: some kid, some idiot playing games with him. Well, he didn't play. He didn't have time for that.

The other car also slowed and sidled into the other lane, but half-way over it skidded on the ice, over-corrected, spun like a black and silver top, and ran itself off the road with a crunch and a scream of tortured metal. Cobar raised his eyebrows, whistled. Now that he could see it side-on, it was a beautiful car. Real muscle car. Vintage. Supercharged. Pity.

As he drove past, the beautiful car's gas tank exploded with a whumph. Fire, everywhere. It was spectacular, flames shooting out with impossible vigor from the hood and the blower and the tailpipe; even the tires caught fire like they'd been drizzled in diesel. Whoever was driving it was a goner even if their spin off the road hadn't done them in. Cobar crossed himself and eased back over the snow into the right lane.

The dawn brightened in his rear-view mirror and he flicked the lever to darken it, to protect his night vision.

Something bright swung onto the road behind him.

The burning car was back on the road. Still burning: fire jetted out of it high and fast, forced out like the stream of a jet engine, the tires alight, the blower spitting. The burning car was gaining on him, accelerating, pulling up beside him as if to pass.

There had to be a rational explanation. He was getting punked. Some kind of Youtube stunt. Some Influencer outfitting their car with flame-throwers and a roll-cage, chasing rednecks to get likes and subscribes. Well, Fernando Cobar was no dumb redneck. He was going to stay cool, and keep going to work. The asshole in the beautiful car would get bored and go away.

Keep driving and they'll go away, he told himself as the burning car dropped back into his blind spot, just behind his Silverado's left rear wheel. Just keep driving—

He stepped on the accelerator despite himself. The burning car swerved at him.

A bang, and the airbags deployed, blinding him. The rear wheels spun out from under him. Now _he_ was going off the road; he spun the wheel, but the world was twirling around him, he'd been jolted sideways in his seat; the truck tipped off the verge and rolled over the snow and stubble, rocked to a stop on one side.

He woke when the truck slammed back upright. “Thank-you,” he sobbed, half-blind from blood in his eyes; the airbags were already deflating when the truck had rolled, and he'd struck his forehead hard on the side window. “Thank-you, thank-you—”

Glass shattered over his face. An iron hand gripped him under the jaw. The seatbelt shredded and reeled away, and Fernando Cobar was yanked from the car by his neck. He hit the ground hard. Brought one shaking arm to his face and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

He had not been rescued.

What stood above him was in no way human.

It was the beautiful car. All the sound and hum and heat of a massive engine, compacted into a narrow upright form, with two legs and two arms and something like a head that gleamed in the oncoming dawn. Black and chrome and burning, it gazed down at him, its limbs all rigid with tension, fire erupting from its vacant eyesockets and between its horrible human teeth.

“No estoy en el Youtube,” Fernando muttered, tasting blood.

It whined, a harsh metallic noise that rose to a scream as the flames jetted hot and bright out of what passed for its head. And then it dove at him, straddled him, strangled him. Closed his throat with one hot leathery hand, and slammed its fist into his ribs again and again.

Fernando bucked under its grip, trying to throw it off, but it was heavy, it might as well be solid metal; it didn't budge. He couldn't think. He couldn't breathe. He ripped at the fingers around his throat, mouth gasping, lungs burning, as the car slammed its fist into his side. The first crack was lightening: pain so sharp and bright it didn't register as pain but more like a star exploding in his chest. But the being kept hitting him. Crack, stars, lightening, the shift of bone on bone. At last the hand at his neck loosened, and he breathed, sucking shards of rib into his chest.

He lay still. Clutched his left side with one trembling arm. Every breath was agony, and he could not breathe fast enough.

The steel skull bent low in front of his face, hot as a running engine, suffocating him with gasoline fumes, watching him. Suddenly the being got off of him, stood, kicked him onto his side. It lifted him by the waist and dumped him in the snowy bed of his own truck. Climbed in, got it running, and drove off over the fields and ditches, crashing and screaming through barbed wire.

Fernando coughed blood. Concentrated on breathing: short, shallow, effortful puffs, each motion grating and tugging and never, never enough air. Clutched his side where his ribs ground together, ground into his lungs. Bounced and tumbled in the truck bed.

He smelled the farm's miasma: the exhalations and the manure of millions of chickens vented into the air by the great industrial fans that were never enough to fully cool or ventilate the chicken sheds. He heard the wheels rumble over gravel, felt the truck slow, the pound and jouncing ease, and now he smelled something new: the methane and ammonia that bubbled up from the lagoon behind the chicken sheds, where the manure and wash water fermented and percolated and settled into fertilizer fit for the fields that surrounded the farm. A great square artificial pond, always steaming with microbial activity, always red or orange with strange organisms and chemicals. Fernando dragged himself upright by the edge of the truck bed and crept toward the tailgate. He had to go. He had to get away.

The truck's door slammed hard enough to jolt his ribs and he felt the heat of the being before he saw it. It growled at him, picked him up by the collar, hauled him out of the car and dragged him toward the steep slanting bank of the lagoon.

“No,” Fernando rasped, scraping his feet weakly over the frozen earth. “No! No, por favor! I have a family! I don't deserve this, no merezco morir!”

The being hauled him up around the earthen dam that contained the filth from the chickens, and then down the other side, into the creamy water up to its shins. Fernando could feel the warmth and steam on his face. The vapors stung his eyes. He coughed, and bones sawed against each-other.

“ _ **Parece que tienes problemas al respirar,**_ ” it rumbled, a mocking tilt of its head. “ _ **Necesitas aire fresco.**_ ”

And it gripped him by the back of the neck and shoved his face into the cesspool.

* * *

 

Mike DeCuster woke at one-thirty in the morning to the shrill of his phone. He stared at it stupidly. He was on the Do Not Call list; didn't matter how much you were worth, you still had to register on the Do Not Call list to keep the robots out. It was an unknown number. Iowa area code.

He silenced it. Fucking scammers. He was trying to sleep; he'd have his tech guy report it in the morning.

The phone rang again. Hung up before he could silence it. Another ring. Hung up. Two rings.

Mike answered the phone, and a young man's voice said, “Nice PJs.”

Mike was wearing flannel pajamas with chickens and sunrises on them. He stared out the dark window, suddenly very conscious of the light of his own phone against his face. “Who is this.”

“You might have heard about the assault at your Iowa egg farm,” the young man continued. His speech was tense and clipped, with a California accent. “I... _hope_ you heard about it. It's your farm. A man's in the hospital. They don't know if he's going to make it.”

“Who are you,” Mike demanded, getting up to draw the curtains shut. His skin raced hot and cold. He wanted to hurt someone. He wanted to hide in the basement. He crept into the bathroom, sat down in the walk-in shower. Tile all around him. Tile stopped bullets, didn't it?

“I'm who put him in the hospital,” the young man said. “They don't know how it happened, do they. The car crash didn't add up.”

Mike might have heard about it. The Sheriff said he would keep the local manager updated with the results of the investigation. As far as they could tell, one of the farm's contractors had been beaten with a sledgehammer and half-drowned in the lagoon. It was grotesque. Calculated.

“Your whole company is guilty,” the voice on the phone continued. “I could keep working my way up. Just like I did Mr. Cobar. I won't run out of people who deserve that. Sooner or later, the FBI or someone is going to notice, and I don't think they'll be happy to find out you're...'harboring illegals' in the trailers behind your hen houses. I think that would embarrass you. Like your dad, with the salmonella thing. I think your...stock might take a dive.”

A threat. This punk was threatening him. A threat was a species of negotiation. This, Mike knew what to do with. “Clearly you want something. And you want it badly enough to risk getting your prepubescent ass reamed in prison for the next twenty years. I...I honestly admire that, kid—”

“In the library you'll find your gold lion-head book-end is on the floor by the fireplace,” the voice said, and Mike almost dropped his phone.

This person had been inside his home.

“Like I said. I could keep working my way up. There's a lot of people in your company who deserve what I did to Mr. Cobar.”

This cruel, violent person had walked through his library. Knew where he lived. “I'm going to call 911,” he said, “and I'm going to get officers all over this house. They're going to find you. They're going to shove you somewhere so deep—”

“No, they won't,” the young man said. Pure dismissal. He was certain of himself, as only the very skilled and the very stupid were. “You don't get to live because you're rich. You get to live because you're useful. You can try to catch me, and maybe wake up in a cesspool with your chest caved in. Or, you can fix what you broke. I'm good either way.” The man fell silent. Mike heard him breathing down the line, slow and deep. Heard his throat click a few times.

Mike, also, concentrated on his breathing, concentrated on controlling his anger and panic so he could respond, deal with the situation. Home invasion and physical assault were bizarre and unfamiliar risks to a man in his position. He did not know what to say.

“Good choice,” the voice said at last. “I have demands.”

“Money?” Money could buy time. Money could buy influence.

“...Just do your fucking job and make your contractors treat people like human beings.”

* * *

 

Robbie gave DeCuster a four week deadline to meet his demands. Those four weeks were a special kind of hell.

Robbie had managed to sack away five hundred dollars and send it to a demonologist in the Valley, advance payment for an exorcism; the appointment was scheduled and everything, he was finally getting Eli out of his head in two weeks, but now he had to worry: Eli kept suggesting that Robbie would disappear or die or his soul would rip in two if he was removed. Eli was a lying sack of shit, but Robbie had to wonder, especially after getting summoned into Pablo's body like a demon, just how alive he really was and what an exorcism would do to him. Could the demonologist do some tests, figure it out before starting? Now the exorcism was booked and he didn't have to keep sending off money, he wanted to get Gabe a set of nice marker pens for Christmas, but his money kept trickling away into pharmacy bills and rent and utilities and gas and food. Robbie still couldn't drive Uber during the day because pax kept one-starring him for having no air conditioning, and the bar traffic at night had slowed down because _other_ people were also trying to save up for Christmas presents.

Eli was pissed that Robbie hadn't let them kill Cobar outright, and he kept accusing Robbie of tricking him. He goaded Robbie into ghosting up four times in two weeks; it was easy, now that Robbie was constantly on edge thinking about Carlos and the other kids. Four ghost-ups meant four hangovers, no appetite, puking up automotive fluids as soon as he got into work. He saw the guys staring at him like they were going to find him dead behind the garage with a syringe in his arm. He resorted to Gatorade and energy drinks, like the kids, so he wouldn't pass out in the middle of the day.

He had to wonder if Eli was doing this to him somehow. Robbie fainting was the surest way for Eli to get control of his body.

Robbie kept tabs on the egg farm as best he could, checking that DeCuster was keeping his word. He used the worm to track the money moving in and out of the farm (so much money; if he knew how, he knew he'd steal it), emails between DeCuster and the local manager, emails between DeCuster and Díaz. The first few days since he'd put the worm in, it stole nine sets of usernames and passwords for him, including two dating apps and a Pornhub account. He searched for news on Fernando Cobar.

 **Call the hospital and ask if Uncle Fernando is alive,** Eli ordered him that first week, while he was halfway through a brake service on a Geo Metro. **We didn't finish the job. You feel it, don't you? Job's not done. You can't rest. You can't eat. You're hungry for something. Call and check on him, and if he's still alive, GET IN THERE AND FINISH HIM OFF.**

_Call the—are you kidding. Are you kidding me right now—caller ID, Eli! No!_

**Spook it! Spook your number, like with DeCuster!**

_You mean “spoof?”_

**Spoof it!**

Robbie smacked a brake rotor with a rubber mallet, perhaps a little harder than he needed to. It was stubborn, rusted in place. His hands were shaking from puking up his breakfast. _I did to Cobar what I wanted to do. If he dies, he dies. If he lives, he lives. Like he did to Carlos._

 **Justice isn't about the intent, Robbie. Justice is about death.** **Death!**

_Whatever._

The trailers got electricity. It was too cold to run plumbing to them, but they got porta-potties, freezing-cold, one for each trailer, and they got heat; electric in some and propane in others. Four more trailers showed up, but the kids were still packed five people into a space meant for two or three. The existing trailers got fumigated. Now they stank of insecticides. Work was still twelve to fourteen hours per day, verging toward fourteen now that the supers were allowing fifteen-minute breaks instead of fives. If they hired more people, they could work eight hour days, but it was... _difficult_ to hire people to live in trailers in the middle of Iowa and work in the laying sheds. Robbie wasn't able to secure all his demands.

He did ensure, under the threat of exposure and violence, that DeCuster made Mr. Díaz return all the deeds to the kids' families' property in Guatemala, wiping out their debts, and then that Mr. Díaz be fired. DeCuster agreed immediately to firing Díaz, called him a dirty opportunist, accused him of stealing the kids’ wages and threatening the viability of the company. Robbie tuned him out.

He checked in with the kids in the trailers in person; Eli ported him in, usually in the middle of the night Iowa time. Only Pablo and Marvin dared step out to meet him, and they never invited him into the trailers again; he saw furtive lights in all the windows flick on whenever he came. Their cell phones were getting charged; they could talk to each-other and the outside world, when they had time. Marvin confirmed that they were making money now, six hundred a week like they’d been promised. Soon they'd have enough money to leave. Get documents somewhere and work somewhere kinder and warmer, or head back home from this misadventure. The improvements in the housing and conditions were too little, too late, and after all, the farm had let Carlos die. Who knew how long these changes would last.

The farm would be glad to see them gone, if they could be replaced; the new supervisors were almost as scared of the kids as the kids were of Robbie, and they watched them like criminals.

Robbie kept checking in on the farm’s finances, reading on his phone late at night while waiting for Uber pax to ping him, or waiting for Salomé to finish one of her appointments when she called for him to shuttle between hotels. Mike DeCuster wasn’t an absentee boss, per se. He was always in contact with management: talking about the price of commodities the farm used for chicken feed, new recipes for layer rations, changes in regulations about what antibiotics and things they were allowed to mix in, disease outbreaks, the price for stew hens, contracts with egg retailers, problems that came up with equipment maintenance at the farm. He paid attention. He wasn’t stupid.

He’d told Robbie, when Robbie had made his demands, that he’d had no idea his contractors were breaking the law, certainly no idea that a kid had died; he’d said that Díaz had been stealing the kids’ wages.

He noticed DeCuster cc’d on an incident report when a forklift driver, Hunter Borden, had injured his back and required a week off work.

If DeCuster didn’t know about conditions on his farms, it was because he didn’t want to know.

Or.

Robbie dug back into last month’s expense sheet.

DeCuster hadn’t paid the kids directly through the farm; he’d paid Manuel Díaz. Díaz was a contractor providing labor; the kids were technically Díaz’s employees, Díaz’s product. Manuel Díaz had a house with a little patch of land and a late-model truck and three sons, one of whom had been in the newspaper for going to Space Camp. Manuel Díaz made good money. Robbie wasn’t great at estimating lifestyles and money, but he had to be making…mortgage two thousand, car payment five hundred, food for five…at least fifty? thousand dollars per year? Plus the trips to Guatemala, and the trailers were his, and at least two other people worked for him as recruiters…so Mr. Díaz’s company probably accounted for two hundred thousand dollars per year, or about twenty thousand per month. Then he’d be paying the kids, or pretending to so he could pocket their wages: twenty-four hundred per month, per kid. About thirty kids. Another seventy-two thousand dollars per month. If Mike DeCuster was telling the truth that Díaz had stolen from him, he should have been paying Díaz’s company about one hundred thousand dollars a month, probably more.

The expense sheet said thirty thousand.

Díaz wasn't stealing the kids' wages alone. DeCuster was in on it, too.

The shift supervisor, Cobar, was directly responsible for Carlos' death, but not for the circumstances that lead to it.

DeCuster was the architect behind the whole damn place.

He could feel Eli go still in the back of his head. Picture his too-sharp eyes dilating, his right hand drifting to the knife he'd used to carry on his belt—a weight Robbie could almost feel sometimes, caught himself reaching for when he wasn't thinking right.

He needed Eli to port him to DeCuster's place.

**You need me to take credit for what you're planning to do.**

No, he didn't.

**I'm happy to. Whatever helps you sleep at night, kid. I told you you needed it: one last fix, and then when I'm gone, you'll have no one else to blame for your hatred, your bloodlust, your murderous urges. Sounds fun. All safe and clean and ready to take care of Gabbie, right?**

Robbie ignored him. Stared at his phone, flicked aimlessly through the spreadsheet. _Everything you say is bullshit._

**Sure it is.**

* * *

 

“Hi, this is Eliot Miller, 555-555-5555. I have an appointment scheduled with Dr. Gregory next week for the, uh, _extraction_. I need to reschedule...do you have any openings next month? Something came up all of a sudden...Text me back or call me on, uh, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday between eight AM and five PM...uh, 555-555-5555. This is Ro-uh—Eliot Miller.”

* * *

 

Mike DeCuster had two homes: a sprawling hill-house in Upstate New York, and a high-rise apartment in Brooklyn. Accessing the apartment was as easy as accessing the house had been: find DeCuster's mailing address off the farm's contacts book, bleed on a piece of company letterhead, and mail himself there. Robbie had done it that first night in the office at the hen houses. But he hadn't let DeCuster know he knew about the Brooklyn apartment, and that was why DeCuster was living there now.

He waited in the apartment's small white living room, staring impatiently out the window at the cars and people below, occasionally scratching his chin where his goatee kept catching in his ski mask. It was noon back home, an off-day at the shop. He'd normally be sleeping. Instead it was four in the afternoon.

Sometimes when DeCuster sent an email, it would have at the bottom, “Sent from my iPad.” Generally, he started answering his emails on the iPad in the late afternoon. This gave a timeline on his habits of movement: CEO stuff in an office where there were likely to be cameras and witnesses, and then more CEO stuff at a coffee shop or restaurant, or hopefully at home.

Robbie fidgeted with his own phone. Airplane mode. Lens was clean. He propped it up against the cast-iron rooster decorating DeCoster's coffee table, checked the picture angle. Shifted a bowl of papier-mache eggs partly in front of it to hide it from view.

**He's coming.**

There were footsteps in the hall.

“Start recording,” Robbie ordered. He waited on the couch behind the coffee table, out of view of the camera.

The lock slid, the knob turned.

Mike DeCuster entered, blue suit and cowboy boots, grooves on each side of his mouth just like his father had on the video testifying to Congress about the salmonella outbreak. He shut the door behind him and walked right past Robbie.

“Hi,” Robbie said.

DeCuster jumped, spun around.

Robbie knew what he saw. A thin male figure in close-fitting dark clothing, black ski mask, black gloves, leaning back against the couch with shoulders back and arms wide, a pose that made him look larger and more comfortable than he was. A pose that said, “Do what I say because I have a gun.” Robbie did not have a gun. But Eli was right: DeCuster didn't even seem to check. “Sit down,” Robbie said. He pointed at the recliner opposite him.

DeCuster sat. His hands were shaking.

“Why do you feed ethanol plant waste to your chickens?” Robbie asked.

DeCuster stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then he ducked his head, looked up. “You're serious?”

Robbie waited.

“It's the high protein fraction of the corn mash,” he said. “Great nutrition, economical.”

“How long does a chicken live?”

“What, in general or—”

“One of yours. Trillian Farms chickens.”

“Sometimes we get three years out of them, average is two-point-three years to replacement. That's well within benchmark—”

“You sound like you know a lot about chicken farming.”

“It's in the family. Look, I complied with your demands. I'm playing ball, here. You want money? After all I've done? Fine, where do I—”

“A kid died from working on your farms,” Robbie interrupted. “Carlos Monterozzo. You know about him?”

DeCuster shut his mouth.

“Really. You don't know?”

**Watch the eyes. If they're hiding something, they always look down and to the left. That's what the books say.**

DeCuster's eyes were wide and still.

“I know how much you paid Manuel Díaz for supplying the kids,” Robbie continued. “Tell me how much that was.”

“I don't remember.”

“Sure. You paid his company thirty grand last month. That's money for him, all his trips, all his employees, kids' college, and housing and salary for thirty farm workers underneath him. I saw the numbers.”

Silence from DeCuster. Then, “That's just what he charged.”

**What a bore. At least Northwick had some fight in him. That's his excuse?**

Robbie opened and closed his mouth, working the tension out of his jaw. When he spoke, his voice shook. “Thirty grand doesn't sound a little _low_ to you?”

“What's this about?” DeCuster asked, looking down, shoulders hunched.

“This is about you,” Robbie bit out, “and what you did. You had teenagers living in filth on your property. Your people tricked them and trapped them there. Your people got a kid killed. You know everything that happens on your farms; if you didn't know, it's because you knew you didn't _want_ to know. You're the boss, I told you to fix it and you fixed it, _you could have fixed it at any time._ Your responsibility. You killed Carlos Monterozzo.”

He watched the blood drain out of DeCuster's craggy face. Then, he watched him look down at the coffee table and notice the camera. DeCuster straightened. “You're filming this?”

Robbie grimaced. The ski mask hid it.

**Told you you shoulda brought a gun.**

DeCuster started to push himself out of the recliner.

“I didn't say you could get up,” Robbie growled, but the older man stood, straightened, let out a long sigh of relief.

“You want a statement, here's your statement,” DeCuster said. “I'm a busy man, I'm involved primarily with the business side of the operation. Marketing, sourcing, strategy. Manuel Díaz was a bad hire. He deceived me about his labor sourcing, and he stole wages from his employees. You want to sue someone, get Manuel Díaz. The only thing I'm guilty of is trusting the wrong contractor. Trillian Farms is a modern, ethical operation dedicated to upholding and exceeding industry standards in worker safety.” And DeCuster reached down, picked up Robbie's phone, and shut it off. Set it on the coffee table, still keeping a safe distance from Robbie's clenched fists. “There. Go to the cops with that, okay, kid? And I'll tell them about your breaking and entering. Make a nice donation to the police pension fund.”

Robbie took deep, measured breaths, his lungs growing hot with exhaust fumes, clenching and unclenching his fists and making his gloves creak. “You don't get away with this just because you're useful to people.”

**Just kill him.**

_No. I want cops._

**He owns the cops.**

_Public justice._

**No such thing.**

_Carlos should get public justice._

**Shoulda brought a gun, kid.**

DeCuster looked down at him, shaking off his fear, relaxing. “Not my fault what happens when people sneak into this country,” he said. “Sometimes they run into bad luck. Not exactly American standards of living, but I figure, since they keep coming, it's gotta be better than what they're used to back South.”

Robbie thought of the cold, the cockroaches, the bucket. He thought of Carlos and his family in the photograph, their clean pressed shirts and the bright sun and green mountains.

He planted his feet on DeCuster's white carpet. Then he seized the cast-iron rooster off the coffee table and swung it in a high fast arc, his whole body flinging it out like a haymaker, buried its heavy base in DeCuster's skull.

 

 

 


	2. The Exorcist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robbie deals with the consequences of his actions in Chapter 1 and hires a shady demonologist to get Eli out of his head for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the Fan-flashworks prompt "magic" and the bingo prompt "name."
> 
> This chapter features a side-character from the outstanding 2000s webcomic Zebragirl, by Joe England. All you need to know about him is in these strips here:
> 
> https://rokhal.tumblr.com/post/185003579992/a-favorite-side-character-from-my-favorite
> 
> Now everyone's favorite part: warnings!  
> Robbie's actions in this chapter verge very close to a suicide attempt.   
> Also, blood. Graphic violence. Gore.

The old man's skull shattered. Blood and brain spattered the bookshelf, the white carpet, the walls of the high-rise apartment. His body slammed to the floor, limbs jerking, back arching. His ostrich-hide boots kicked the coffee table.

The crunch of bone, the sound and the feel of the impact, echoed through Robbie's brain. Michael DeCuster, who created all the suffering that was Trillian Farms, who boasted that he was untouchable, who'd gotten Carlos Monterozzo killed and didn't even pretend to regret it—a sudden hard blow and DeCuster was just so much meat. Robbie knew now what the twitching and gasping meant, the heaving chest, the trembling limbs in their fine wool suit: that was death. There was no more Michael DeCuster in the world. No amount of money could undo what Robbie had just done so easily.

Robbie took a slow, shaking breath, his heart pounding, and for an instant he wanted to laugh, to scream, floating away from himself on a tide of ecstasy.

**Oh thank fuck,** Eli said very quietly in the back of his mind.

Robbie dropped the bloody cast-iron rooster. It dented the coffee table with a bang. His hands trembled. The strange joy vanished as suddenly as it had welled up. He still felt halfway outside his body, about to fly apart, but now he felt cold, sickened. He smelled urine and feces, DeCuster's corpse letting go. He had not planned to kill him. He had walked into this room planning to talk to him, threaten him, maybe turn him in to the Feds somehow as an anonymous tip, but in a split-second's rage he'd grabbed the rooster statue and bashed him in the head, and in the moments between the statue sinking into DeCuster's temple and his rational mind grasping what he'd just done, he had felt the most potent rush of triumph of his entire life. “You are their god,” Eli had said about these moments, and, God help Robbie, Eli was right.

From Eli, Robbie caught only the echoes of desperate relief.

Robbie stared down at the body as the twitching stopped. “I didn't mean to—” Oh, but he'd meant it. “I didn't plan to do that. I didn't plan to kill him.” He'd killed someone without planning to. Eli was right. He was getting a taste for it. He was not in control; he was a killer, and he would kill again. Eli was right.

Even if Mike DeCuster fit the criteria of Robbie's deal with Eli—DeCuster killed by proxy and indifference, tortured by the loosest definition of the word, and as for rape, there was no indication—Robbie had decided to abandon the deal after they'd killed the murderous trauma surgeon back in Los Angeles, leaving the victim's family with no way to get justice through a confession and no way to get closure. He'd resolved that Eli couldn't blackmail him into killing again. And here he was, killing again. On an impulse.

**Heh-heh. That's what you get for bragging about how you own the police,** Eli said. **Nice shot. I'm proud of you, kid.**

Robbie swallowed down bile.

**Take the compliment. You got the reflexes! You got the instincts! Finally I can see the family resemblance! This is your nature. This is great! Whaddya say we forget our recent arguments, and join forces again. Like when we took down that Mr. Hyde clown, or Yegor Ivanov. You bring the fire, I'll take care of the strategy, we'll take turns cracking skulls—now you've finally pried that stick out—**

“I don't want to kill again.”

**Yes, you do! You're lying to my face, you little shit!**

“I'm not in control. I need to be in control. I'm not going to kill again.” His mouth was dry. He couldn't stop staring at the deep dent in DeCuster's head, the torn skin and red, pink, white, of blood and brain and bone. He could almost feel the sweeping, terrible joy again, he wanted it back, and the wanting made him sick.

**Well, I hate to break this to you, but you're nineteen years old. You're not gonna be in control of yourself for a good five more years at least. This guy was an asshole. Be realistic. Enjoy the ride. Use our power. First step: don't get caught.**

Guilt and horror did not change the fact that Robbie could not afford to get caught. He followed Eli's advice and wrapped DeCuster's head in his own suit jacket to contain the blood, stuffed the rooster statue in alongside. Dragged him by the feet into the bathroom, shoved him into the glass-walled walk-in shower. Then Robbie reached down into the panic and anger and the rage that still smoldered from what DeCuster had done, hiring minors from Guatemala under the table to work in his filthy laying-hen sheds, trapping them in crowded and roach-infested trailers, letting his contractors push the kids for more work, more and more, until one of them dropped dead of pneumonia and heat stroke. His body burned away, a blaze of fury and gasoline, and the fire condensed into the Rider. Leather and kevlar racing jumpsuit, chrome skull venting flames, sparks and burning oil sputtering between clenched teeth.

The Rider knelt down, reached through the shadow cast by the vanity lights, passed his hand through into the trunk of the Charger parked blocks away. Came up with a length of hot steel chain that he whirled around the bathroom, smashing the shower glass out of his way.

He focused on the body. _Make it go away._ **Send it down.** Spun the chains over it, faster and faster, until flames danced over the surface of the tile, the shower floor warped and peeled outward, and a black, stinking void swallowed what was left of Mike DeCuster. The Rider let the chains slow, the flames die away. The shower tiles settled back into their grid. The Rider turned the shower on full blast to rinse the soot down the drain, then turned his attention to the car, homed in on the rush of flames through the blower and the rumble of its engine, and sank through his shadow into the driver's seat.

Snow-melt boiled away under the Charger's tires where he'd left it parked illegally in a pay lot. Ash fluttered from under the wiper blades where three parking tickets had been stuffed. Eli opened a fire-ringed portal under their wheels, a long one, out of New York and back home to Los Angeles. They dropped into the dark and emerged in an alley under a sparking transformer, and snuffed out.

_I have to port back to Iowa tonight. I have to tell Pablo. In case someone—the kids need a heads-up. That I just murdered the owner of the company._

**Ignorance is the best defense.**

_I'll let Pablo figure out what to tell them._

It was noon in California, gently warm, the sun beating down on the car. Robbie was supposed to be sleeping; he'd been up all last night carrying Uber pax; he had four more hours until it was time to pick Gabe up from school—the middle-school this time. He got his phone out, took it off airplane mode, double-checked his schedule: yes, noon, the middle school, Gabe wasn't riding the bus.

He didn't want to drive home so soon after killing a man, not again. He shut his engine down, climbed into the back bench seat, and curled up with his jacket over his head. The heat built and built inside the cabin, his muscles relaxed, the nausea of guilt and the rush of aggression both faded away.

He roused himself at two in the afternoon, woke up his phone. It was running a little slow, and there was a warning light about the battery overheating. He groaned and cracked a window. Called the demonologist for the second time that week. “Hi, this is Eliot Miller, 555-555-5555. I hate to keep bothering you, but...something came up and I need to reschedule my appointment again. Please let me know if you have anything this week. As soon as possible. Text me any time. Eliot Miller, 555-555-5555.”

 

* * *

 

As he pulled into the lot at his old middle school—now Gabe's for three days a week—his phone rang. He whipped it out, practiced from two months of answering Uber pings, hoping for the demonologist. It was Gabe. He answered, a jolt running up and down his back. “Hey, buddy, what's up?”

Gabe answered, guarded. “Robbie?”

Robbie shut his engine down, sighed, rubbed his forehead. “Yeah, it's me, Gabe.”

He heard Gabe breathing down the line, long seconds stretching. Gabe didn't do this all the time, but he did it often enough, and Robbie hated it, hated that Gabe had to ask. And really: there was no way to prove that Robbie was who he said he was. As far as he could tell, Gabe just...waited him out.

“It's me, Gabe,” he said again.

More silence. Then, “Robbie-Robbie?”

“Yeah,” Robbie said, fast. “Yeah, buddy. What do you need?”

A sigh. “Robbie-Robbie.” Faintly, away from the microphone, “It's Robbie!” Then, “Robbie, Mateo's mom is really nice. Mateo says I can come to his house to play X-Box, and his mom says yes, too. Can I?”

“Um,” Robbie said. That morning, before unexpectedly murdering Mike DeCuster, he'd been looking forward to seeing Gabe. He'd planned to capture a taped confession, anonymously email it to the FBI, and come home with a clean conscience to help Gabe with his homework and take another crack at making arroz con pollo. Now, it was almost a relief to know that Gabe could spend the evening with someone else. Someone clean. “Let me talk to Mateo's mom, please, and we'll see.”

“Okay, Robbie. Mateo's mom, this is Robbie on the phone. Robbie is my big brother.”

He'd met Mateo, and his mom Gloria Flores, two weeks ago. Mrs. Flores was a smart lady with a fairly free-rein approach to parenting that let her son Mateo go to school in ripped jeans and a red Mohawk. She and her husband ran a bookkeeping business. “Hi, Mrs. Flores.”

“Hi, Robbie. I don't know if you had other plans; the boys came up with this on their own. Is it all right if Gabe stays for dinner this time? I was thinking of ordering Chinese...”

“Yeah,” Robbie said. Rice, small bites, you could eat it with a spoon. “Yeah, Chinese is good. I should bring his chair, though—he gets tired on the crutches, I can drop it off. And he needs his evening meds—I'll get those, too—and call me if he needs help—”

“Of course. Gabe's a great kid. I promise I'll call if anything comes up. Now you take some time for yourself, okay? Don't worry.”

“Okay,” Robbie said.

He heard, “Your brother says it's okay,” and then he heard Gabe, “Thanks, Robbie!” and Mateo, “Yes!”

 

* * *

 

 

The Flores house was landscaped in flowering bushes and cacti, and a few raised beds of vegetables. Robbie lugged the power chair over the gravel walkway to the front door, rang the doorbell. Mrs. Flores answered it, held the door while he carried the chair in. There was a table covered in papers and two open laptops. On the couch, Gabe and Mateo sat with video-game controllers. Cheery music and bright colors and the _pshew-pshew_ of family-friendly gunshots.

“Hey, Gabe,” Robbie said.

“Hi, Robbie,” Gabe replied, eyes fixed the screen of the TV in front of him. He was sitting elbow-to-elbow with Mateo, whose hair was looking a bit floppy, the roots starting to show below the red. They mashed buttons with identical, focused intensity. Suddenly Gabe looked up at him, eyes narrowed. “Robbie?”

“I brought your chair, and your meds,” Robbie said. He pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket, stuck it in the caddy that hung from the right armrest. “I put your meds right here, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Call me if you need anything.”

“Okay, Robbie,” Gabe said. He turned back to the game, apparently satisfied that Eli would never bother bringing him his chair and pills, which, fair. It still stung a little.

Robbie went home again, took a Benadryl, tried to sleep. Sat up after an hour, bleary-eyed, got online, and checked the news for New York City. Nothing on any missing egg-farm owners. Of course not, it was the middle of the night in New York. DeCuster wouldn't be missed until tomorrow, and it might be days before anyone forced open his apartment to look for him.

He wondered if Mike DeCuster had kids, siblings—people who'd mourn him. He had two ex-wives; he probably had kids. But Carlos Monterozzo had had a mother, a father, and a little sister. He'd been seventeen years old. DeCuster's family would get over it faster than Carlos's. Robbie had enough to worry about, he wouldn't feel sorry for some theoretical DeCuster grandchildren.

The demonologist called him back as he scrolled aimlessly through the news feeds. “Thank-you for getting back to me, Dr. Gregory,” Robbie said, and yawned.

“Of course.” Dr. Gregory talked like a private eye in a black and white movie: wry, grim, gravelly. “You wanted to reschedule your exorcism appointment...again.”

“I do. Do you have anything sooner?”

“This Thursday at three.”

Sounded final. Robbie would have to call Canelo, take off work early. “I'll be there.”

Dr. Gregory grunted. “I understand possession and the power it promises can be...seductive. But do not delay your appointment again.”

Robbie shuddered. “I'll be there,” Robbie insisted. “I just needed to...I'm finished. I want this thing out of me. I want my life back.”

 

* * *

 

 

Robbie picked up Gabe at eight. He was reluctant to leave, full up on Chinese take-out, and he had safety pins all over his clothes. His homework was done. Mrs. Flores assured Robbie that Gabe had had a great time, and Mateo asked if he could come back next week. Gabe fell asleep on the ride home, and Robbie carried him inside and helped him brush his teeth, a task Gabe normally managed unassisted. With Gabe in bed, he carried the chair back to the apartment, left Gabe's Jitterbug on the nightstand in easy reach, and headed out to one of his favorite teleport spots, an unmonitored alleyway beneath a sparking electrical transformer. It camouflaged the EMF residue the Rider left when they transformed or teleported.

He thought of the teenagers in the trailers at Trillian Farms, whose families back in Guatemala had been tricked into mortgaging their land to get their sons American jobs that turned out to be slave labor gussied up with a little wage theft. He thought about the photo of the Monterozzo family, Carlos a younger, ganglier duplicate of his father, sixteen years old at most at the time it was taken. He’d killed Michael DeCuster over Carlos. Nearly killed Fernando Cobar. He’d punished the people most responsible for Carlos’ death. The fires still roared up eagerly when he thought about the kids, though: heat and vibration all through his limbs, fumes and fire rising out of his lungs, his engine revving, his blower shrieking, rage rising to a peak that finally blew the engine, consumed his body. _I want to go to Iowa._

Eli opened a portal under their wheels, and they fell through and emerged in a snow-covered field, a starry darkness. Robbie focused himself within the Rider, pulling his anger back, _we’re done, I avenged Carlos, there’s nothing more I can do for him, I can’t help these kids any more than I have,_ and snuffed the fires out. He felt weary and whiplashed whenever he changed back and forth so quickly, frustrated and nauseated whenever he snuffed out without beating on anyone while he was the Rider. He drank one of the waters he kept under the seat for Uber pax. Got out of the car, trudged shivering through the darkness to the copse of trees where the kids who worked the egg farm were housed. Passed new trailers—not brand-new, but they hadn’t been there the first time he’d come to the farm—and six porta-potties, another improvement.

He knocked on the door of an aqua-colored single-wide with white trim. “Soy yo, Robbie,” he called. “El espíritu avengador.” He took a careful breath, grimaced as his nose-hairs froze together. “Vine a hablar con Pablo o Marvin.”

Pablo and Marvin were the only boys he’d seen in person since he’d attacked Fernando; the rest just watched out the windows of the trailer, fearful. Pablo likely blamed himself for cursing them all with Robbie and Eli, which, fair, and Marvin stood by as bodyguard while Pablo played spokesman to the ghost. Robbie had made an unfortunate first impression and later proven it correct. He didn’t think any of them had actually wanted Mr. Cobar in the ICU on a ventilator when they’d prayed to Santa Muerte to send them a vengeance spirit three weeks ago.

He heard a rustling from inside, saw a light flick on. Electricity: also a recent development. Five minutes later, Robbie's socks were soaked and his toes were numb. Pablo and Marvin crept out, Pablo short and stocky, his precocious beard hidden in a blue fleece scarf, and Marvin beside him, tall, long-haired, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his puffy coat.

Pablo's Spanish had an accent that Robbie could only assume was how they talked in Guatemala. “What's going on?” he asked, standing six feet away. Behind him, Marvin shut the trailer door to keep the heat in.

“They treating you alright still?” Robbie asked. “No threats? Full salary?”

“Hard to sleep easy knowing they never even reported Carlos dead,” Pablo said. “But for now, yeah. It's livable. Sergio's got a line on a grower operation in Missouri and a guy who does papers; a lot of us want to go with him.”

“Any place in the States that doesn't check papers has got to be _super shady,_ ” said Robbie, lapsing into Spanglish. “I mean...exploitative.”

Pablo shrugged. Marvin said, “It's just three years until my brother finishes school. I mean.”

Carlos' death weighed on them. It weighed on Robbie, and he had only ever seen his picture.

Robbie clenched his jaw, shuddered. Everything was shriveling from the cold; his nose was running and his ears felt like they were on fire. There was a limit to what he could do to help these kids, and what he'd just done today was probably the opposite of helpful. “I wanted to give you a _heads-up._ A, a warning. Today, I—” **You acted on a simple, natural urge.** “I went to New York and I killed the owner of Trillian Farms.”

Pablo and Marvin stared at him. “Thank-you for everything you've done for us,” Pablo said at last. “You can stop. I release you. I release you from your summons—”

_Dammit I'm just a person, I'm a human like you!_ Robbie ground his teeth. “It was my decision— _I was gonna film him for the Feds, I don't know_. I killed him, it was stupid—” **It was completely appropriate!** “—and you guys deserve a warning before the police come, or anything else changes. He was the one I was threatening, to get you—” Robbie stared around at the trailers and porta-potties; they weren't what he would call decent housing, but they were a vast improvement. “Hygienic living conditions,” he finished lamely. “And in two days, if everything goes right, I won't have the power to come here anymore. I'm getting an... _exorcism._ ”

Pablo stepped forward, hand outstretched as if to pat him on the shoulder. Robbie took a step back, and Pablo lowered his hand. “I didn't mean it that way,” he said. “Thank-you for helping us. We'll be alright. We've got power, we've got phones...things aren't like they were. I mean, it's still a shit job, but it's just a job now.”

“Good luck with your exorcism,” Marvin added.

“Thanks,” Robbie said, looking at the thin steel steps of the single-wide. “I don't know if you should tell the others or not. My, uh, demon says if you know too much the police will think you were involved in the murder, but his advice is terrible unless it's about how to kill people. So, do what you think is best.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Pablo said.

Robbie nodded, waved, and they separated: the kids to the warm trailer, Robbie through the woods and into the running Charger. He plastered his hands against the hot air that blasted through the vents, shivering. **There you go. Get warm. Feels good to see those kids, right? You helped them. They need you. We're their heroes, Robbie. Now get yourself warmed up for real, and let's go on a little ride for old times' sake. Burn those damn chicken-sheds to the ground.**

_How about back to LA. Koreatown._

**Suits me. Kick in doors until someone starts shooting!**

Robbie wanted that. He wanted to hit people. He wanted to burn things. He wanted the ping and impact of bullets against the Rider's faceplates. He burned up and let Eli port them away to terrorize his city for the last time.

 

* * *

 

Thursday at three-twenty-three pm, Robbie arrived at a cheery brick ranch house in Yorba Linda. He'd had a rough trip: the Charger kept stalling at intersections, he’d almost swerved into an oncoming Fed-Ex truck on one of the smaller roads, his right calf was cramping so bad he could barely work the gas pedal, and his eyes were watering so he could hardly see. He'd barely made it across town alive. Eli was not going quietly.

The house was pink, the lawn was green. Big neatly-trimmed juniper bushes partly screened the front yard from the quiet street. A sign in the front yard read, “G. H. Gregory, Dr. of Demonology: Radical and Applied”. Dr. Gregory had put his sign right on top of an old For Sale/Sold sign. Probably saved him fifty bucks.

Robbie shut his motor down with a vicious twist of the ignition, slammed his door, and limped up the front step to ring the doorbell.

A tall, dour man in a baggy tweed jacket answered the door after the second ring. He peered down at Robbie through round, mirrored glasses, and Robbie squinted back at him. Only a low ring of sandy hair remained at the tops of his ears; high on his bald forehead was a round reddened scar that looked oddly like a disgusted emoji. Robbie decided not to ask. “Eliot Miller?” the man said. Sounded like cigarettes and bad news.

The voice fit the man. “Dr. Gregory,” Robbie rasped. “Sorry I’m—” His voice locked up. He gestured vaguely at this throat and at the car, pushed past into the house.

“Your possessing spirit is resisting your efforts,” Dr. Gregory finished for him, and Robbie nodded. The house was clean and hollow, the living room empty of furniture, the walls bare. “All the more reason to be timely. Follow me, I’ve prepared the garage.”

_**Dick.**_ Robbie followed him. His leg went pins-and-needles and he fell and barely caught himself from bashing his head on a wall. Dr. Gregory grabbed him by the shoulder and Robbie allowed it, shaking out his foot.

They managed to get Robbie down the hallway and out into the attached garage, where a sturdy-looking wooden armchair sat in the center of a twelve-foot circle of painted symbols, dimly lit under a single fluorescent light. No cars, no yard tools. On a work bench sat three suit-cases of bottles and lenses and intimidating instruments.

Robbie lashed out at him suddenly, multi-tool in his hand, blade out. Dr. Gregory dodged back, caught his arm on the return swing. Coolly squeezed on a painful pressure point until Robbie's hand let it drop to the concrete with a clunk. “Thanks,” Robbie croaked.

Dr. Gregory grunted. There was a nick on his throat, fresh blood oozing just below his Adam’s apple. “Sit down. Hold on to the arms so I can secure you.”

**Robbie. Don’t do this! Don’t let him do this to us! You’re dead, you** _**died,** _ **we’re one and the same, you can’t live without me! You’ll fuckin’ melt like the Wicked Witch without me holding you together! Dammit boy!**

Robbie sat in the chair, dug his fingernails into the arms while Dr. Gregory secured his waist with a belt and his limbs with heavy-duty zip ties. Robbie shut his eyes so Eli couldn't see Dr. Gregory moving, focused on his body, focused on the car: don't move, don't move. He could feel Eli in him: prodding and testing, clawing at his nerves limb by limb. _Yeah, you're scared,_ Robbie thought viciously. _I didn't ask for you to bring me back. You always want something, you always have an angle, and everything you say is bullshit. I'm getting you out of my life._

**Do the words “eternal spiritual bond” mean NOTHING to you?!** Eli demanded, making Robbie kick against the wire ties. Robbie released his hold on the body as Dr. Gregory strapped his last arm down, concentrated on keeping Eli from starting the car.

“I suppose it's foolish of me to ask you to take this orally,” Dr. Gregory said, somewhere behind them. “Hold still.” He forced their head backward with a huge, callused hand under their chin. Eli felt a prick low in the side of his throat, and then his heart skipped a few beats. The demonologist pounded on his chest with the flat of his palm. Eli coughed. Suddenly his mouth tasted bitter. His head lolled back, all his muscles going slack, and his heart picked up again, lazy, slow. “Better?”

Eli pried the kid's eyes open, and he stared at the wall of the garage behind him, upside down. There was a garden hose rack screwed to the wall, but no garden hose. He rolled his eyes to get a look at the painted patterns on the floor around him. There was a scorpion—seal of Mars or something, to keep demons at bay. Big Latin inscription around the outside, invoking the protection of...somebody, he couldn't see that part. A few other sigils he vaguely recognized, for commanding demons. He needed his books for the specifics, but he got the gist. “ **I’m in trouble,** ” he giggled, sing-song.

The demonologist circled around to his head and peered into his face. Lifted his head back upright. “I’ll do some tests, and then we’ll see how much trouble you’re in.”

“ **Fuck yooooou. I want a…a law…hmmm.** ” He curled his toes in his shoes, twisted his forearms slowly back and forth in the zip ties. His body moved at half speed. Dr. Gregory seemed to teleport back and forth across the room, mixing things, prepping equipment. When he felt out for the car, the kid was blocking him and he couldn't concentrate enough to force his way in. “ **Not fair.** ”

“No, fairness is an illusion to comfort the weak,” Dr. Gregory agreed, picking up a padded steel headband that bristled with lenses.

“ **That’s smart,** ” he replied.

Dr. Gregory grabbed his chin again, evading a weak bite, and peered into his eyes with the lenses. “Did you know your irises have changed color.”

He shut one eye, then the other. He couldn’t remember which side was supposed to be the orange one. “ **Noooo…** ”

Something hot and stinking waved under his nose. A wad of burning herbs as thick as two Cuban cigars. He held his breath—it reeked and stung his nostrils. At last he couldn’t hold back any longer, sucked smoke into his lungs, and coughed explosively. “ **I gh—I guess...ugh...** ”

“Yes?”

He raised his head, with effort, and looked the taller man in the eyes, past his elaborate magnifiers. “ **Guess 'issa where I tell ya yer mother sucks cocks in hell?** ”

“Tell me what you like.”

He leaned forward and tried to bite him again, and the demonologist shoved him back by the forehead with no obvious effort. Splashed liquids on his skin, pulled on his eyelids, looked in his ears, cut the back of his left hand with a scalpel. Eli tried to burn up, break his way out of the chair; he couldn't feel any of his power at all. He struggled to force his way out of the kid's drugged, stupid body and into the car, waiting outside the garage, but the kid blocked him out, sprawled through the steel. “ **You getting anything there, Doc?** ”

“Some,” the demonologist replied from behind him. “Look up for me. Look at the light.” There was a little red dot shining against the garage’s unfinished drywall. A laser pointer. “Keep watching. You will hear a sound.”

From behind him, a high-pitched hum started, rising and falling, like blowing over the lip of a bottle, like the Santa Ana wind catching in the air conditioners on top of the kid's apartment in the middle of the night. At first it was just a pleasant singing, restful and comforting, but then his scalp and spine began to tingle. He watched the laser, drifting and jiggling in his dazed vision. The laser pointer seemed to swell, covering his field of view, sparkling and swirling, as the chime behind his head rang louder and louder. He stretched up his spine, stretched out his hands and feet as far as they could. “ **Wow,** ” he breathed.

He felt as though the floor was unfurling beneath his feet, flowing like a fountain that buoyed him higher and higher. He was rising to a high peak, into a scintillating red-and-purple haze. His gaze was fixed, his senses suddenly keen, flooded with the high sweet sound and the astringent scent of the smoke and the sparkling lights, his thoughts focused, intent, observing. The sound rang on and on, sending chill waves of sensation cascading down his back. All he heard was the sweet sustained chime, all he saw were the brilliant lights. And all at once, he perceived:

The chime was a harmony, the lights a swarm. A million billion voices and lives, interdependent, all capable of perceiving the same beauty that he now saw. The collective consciousness of the universe. The fears and dreams of the multitudes, their striving for survival, their ideals, their selfishness and generosity, their joy, their aspirations, he saw. Their glorious potential, a consciousness as one, all-loving, all-compassionate, hopeful, powerful, he saw. The intricate reverberations that each made upon each-other, joined in infinite webs of love and causality and destiny stretching a million billion years to the past and future, he saw.

All those conscious, wheeling sparks of light tugged at each-other. Each movement by one sent ripples affecting the movements of others, spreading like waves of thought through this collective cosmic mind; some of these thoughts had first occurred before the dawn of humanity, some before the dawn of species older than humankind. Waves of joy, waves of pain, that nudged the radiant brain of the universe nearer or further from its potential.

And he saw his place in this web. Instead of protecting and uplifting the whole, he had chosen to become a cancer. He killed out of obligation and for pleasure, snuffing out potential, orphaning children, widowing spouses, forcibly tearing bright conscious nodes from their network, leaving a booming, ringing, sighing, howling cry of pain behind him, again and again, pain that would reverberate for decades, inspiring fear, inspiring imitation, inspiring revenge; pain that cried out through the collective mind for justice, twisting the whole further from love, nearer to hatred. The momentary joy he received from his actions against his fellow creatures was eclipsed a thousand times over by the cascades of grief and rage that echoed through the universal soul, a collective thirst for retribution that would persist, in some way, until the last mind touched by humanity faded into the void.

Eli knew he was a badass motherfucker. But he'd never imagined he was this good.

The sound stopped. The light was just a laser pointer on the wall again. He shook his head, feeling small and cold and hollow. “ **Why'd you,** ” he started, blinking. “ **Do it again.** ”

The demonologist stepped into view, a round brass bowl and a polished stick in his hands. “What you experienced just now was a side effect,” he said. “A simple diagnostic test, to heighten your aura. It gave me the last information I needed to determine a proper treatment.”

**Shit.** “ **And what's that?** ” he slurred, lurching back and forth in the chair.

The demonologist turned around. He'd set down the bowl, and now, in his hands, was an engraved, three foot long machete. “Beheading.”

“ **Oh, boy.** ” He leaned back in the chair. “ **You know I’m not the kid, right? Kid’s nice. You talked on the phone. I let him drive almost alla time.** ” He reached his muzzy thoughts out to the car. **Robbie, stop hogging the car and get over here.** “ **Kid’s a…he’s got responsibilities. His little brother’s slow. Takes care o’him.** ”

Silence from Robbie. The demonologist said, “That’s unfortunate,” and swung the machete.

Eli jerked backward in the chair, managed to pitch back, knock the whole thing to the floor, and tuck his chin to keep from cracking his head open. Now he was on his back, tied to a chair. **I’m not playing, kid, he’s gonna kill us. This isn’t an exorcism! He’s trying to chop our head off!** He strained in the chair, making the wood creak. Reached for the fires even though he could never get himself to burn with the kid blocking him, but there was nothing. Nothing. **Gabbie’s gonna be all on his own.** “ **Are you sure this’ your only option?** ” Eli demanded. “ _ **I**_ **could chop some teenager's head off** **. Not that I would, I’m a nice guy, I’m a good ghost…** ”

**Robbie! You don’t want to die!**

The demonologist hauled the chair back upright. Probably didn’t want to damage the machete swinging it against concrete. From the car, Eli felt Robbie stir, felt him take a look through their eyes. **There. Giant fuck-off magical machete. Stop blocking our power!**

From the kid, shock and betrayal. _ He's really trying to kill me. _

**That's what I said!**

_He can't fix me._

**No! Now stop blocking our power and help me burn us up!**

_I'm not doing it._

**What?**

_I'm not blocking our power. I'm holding the car._

**So gimme the car! Crush him like a grape!**

But Robbie did not allow Eli to access the car. He retreated, further into the car, leaving Eli drugged, powerless, and strapped to the chair. The demonologist took another swing, this time bracing the chair down with one foot on the seat between the kid's legs. Eli twisted in his seat, jerking his head down and his shoulder up as far as it could go with his wrist tied to the chair arm. Felt like his whole left arm got hit with an electric baseball bat. A painful jerk and a metallic ping, and the demonologist yanked the machete free. A half-moon chunk of the edge was missing. “Of course,” he muttered, inspecting the blade.

**Robbie, get the fuck back here! This is on you!**

Blood poured down the kid's arm, soaking the sleeve on the inside of his bicep where Eli could still feel. Where was the metal chunk? Spelled metal could be nasty, especially to something like him. He unrolled, inspected the chair behind him. Nothing. Nothing on the floor. It had to still be in the bone. He imagined he could feel it, cold-burning, but that was probably the air on the exposed edges of his shoulder muscles.

The demonologist turned his back and set the blade on the table, wiped Robbie's blood off on a paper towel. Got out a Dremel and a burr cone, and set to work re-engraving whatever sigils were currently lodged high on the side of Robbie's humerus.

**Looks like we got a reprieve,** Eli said, struggling to slow his breathing and compress the wound against the chair back. It hurt. He hated being hurt. It should be the kid out here, bleeding out, feeling this.  **Talk to me. Let's work through this. Problem-solve. What the** _**fuck** _ **is your problem?**

_You. I told you. You're my problem, Eli._

**WHAT? No. No! I've been civil! We work together! You told me you weren't gonna get suicidal unless we were hurting Gabbie, that's what you said!**

_I'm not in control. I'm just getting more and more like you, all the time. I'm a killer now. And if this is the only way to get rid of you—_

**Is this about the chicken guy.** _**Really?** _ **Some twice-divorced millionaire running a human trafficking ring in Iowa?** _**That's** _ **who you suicide over? That was** _**justice,** _ **Robbie! You are a righteous instrument of cosmic vengeance! I saw it, there's a—a mind-web! A reason for everything!**

The demonologist opened another suitcase that sat on the workbench and lifted out an ornate, leatherbound tome stuck full of post-it notes. A sixteenth-century  _ Clavicula Salomonis,  _ looked like _. _ He flipped to a marked page full of hand-drawn diagrams, started copying one onto the machete. The grinder screeched and a fine spray of sparks shot from the steel.

**You're pissed at me, I don't know why. Fine. But Gabbie needs you. He'll need you for the rest of his life. You can't abandon him. You have to take care of him, that's your purpose. You gonna walk away? Abandon him like my brother abandoned the two of you? 'Cause that's how he'll see it. He won't understand. Who's gonna tell the kid, “Sorry, Robbie-Robbie's not coming home 'cause Robbie-Robbie's head and torso were recovered from the Sonora Desert in separate oil-drums.” No. Nobody's gonna tell him. It'll break him. Remember how he was, when I took you for a ride and you came back home and found him lying on the kitchen floor curled around a half-eaten raw cabbage? He hated you! That's how I got into him!**

**I'll do it again, kid. If I survive this, if this “Doctor of Demonology” doesn't** _**really** _ **know his shit, I'll hop back into your brother. And let me tell you, he handles a lot smoother than you.**

Another spark of hatred from the kid. Eli could feel him thinking— **come on, fight!** —but he stayed rooted in the car, locking Eli out. Blood soaked his sleeve. Eli felt it plastered to his arm, pooling in the leather jacket beneath his elbow. The demonologist set the dremel down, tilted the blade back and forth, nodded to himself. Then he switched heads on the dremel and started grinding a new edge inside the missing chunk. 

Eli gave up on trying to compress the wound and started rocking back and forth in the chair. His muscles were slack, uncoordinated, but the drug was starting to wear off. He got the chair scooting backward, a loud honking noise of oak scraping concrete. An inch. He kept at it: scrape, honk. More inches. Closer to the edge of that ring of sigils on the floor; either he could cross that barrier, or he couldn't. Nothing to be gained by sitting here.

Suddenly the kid shoved his way into the body, grabbed hold of his throat. “How sure are you?” Robbie demanded, half his concentration still immobilizing the Charger's ignition coil. “Can you really keep him from coming back?”

Dr. Gregory turned around. The fresh-ground edge of the blade in his hand seemed to glow in the fluorescent light. “In all honesty, I've never seen two spirits bound quite like this,” he said. “Your possessing spirit, while human and ordinarily subject to standard dispersion methods, shows extensive ritual self-modification. And as for you, Eliot...you show signs of—”

“Can you really kill him?” Robbie demanded. And then, the drugs making him weak, “Can't you save me?”

“I save humans,” Dr. Gregory said dismissively. “Living humans. I'm not sure what you are, but, mystically-speaking, you don't qualify.”

Robbie leaned forward in the chair. Outside the garage, he heard Eli start the car. “You don't know what we are,” he repeated. His shoulder ached, burned; his heart was racing and his lips felt numb. Maybe he was a zombie or a ghost, but he was a ghost with two jobs and a lease, he was a ghost who'd scored in the 90 th percentile on his GED, who ate and slept and shaved and cut his hair; he was a ghost who could diagnose a rough idle on a turboed, engine-swapped '62 Skylark. He was a ghost who got to have Gabe in his life. He hadn't deserved to be gunned down in an alley last year, and he didn't deserve to die now because this asshole couldn't do a thorough workup. “You wrote me off and you don't even know what the problem is.”

“I've been in this business for twenty-three years,” Dr. Gregory began, but Robbie snarled:

“ _I paid five hundred bucks for this shit._ ”

The engine growled as he said it. The blower sang. Dr. Gregory spun around, faced the garage door, and Robbie felt the tires spin, felt the car leap at him. It punched through the door, dragging warped steel door panels over the floor and plowing Robbie away. The chair tipped, he fell on his side, landed painfully. He could barely see around his knees; the car could barely see, sheets of painted steel filling the garage and obstructing their vision. He heard clattering and slamming in front of their hood, the demonologist struggling upright, and they lurched blindly forward, dragging sheet metal over Robbie's body. They hit the wall. Either they'd hit Dr. Gregory, or he'd escaped into the house or the yard.

They had to get the body out of the chair. They backed up, caught the chair legs under their back bumper. The chair started to skid backward. Too tentative, they didn't have time. They edged forward again, revved the engine, and then reversed sharply: the car's weight shifted onto the front wheels and the back end rose up. Robbie watched it coming, stared grimly up at his undercarriage until it crashed down on the side of the seat.

The seat shattered. Hardwood exploded against the backs of his thighs, the chair legs came unglued. He kicked out, got his shins free. Straightened his legs with a wrench, broke the chair-back off the seat, loosened the arms. Pushed himself to his hands and knees, bits of wood still zip-tied to his limbs. He grabbed his bumper and tried to melt into it, but he was trapped outside, he wasn't burning up, he couldn't merge with the car. He popped the trunk, hauled himself to his feet, and rolled inside, let the steel hatch shut his body in. He curled around himself in the darkness, sobbed in pain and confusion and disappointment.

**Did you learn something,** Eli demanded sarcastically.

They backed up, trying to get out of the garage, but stopped short at the painted ring on the floor: their body was inside. They couldn't leave. It was some kind of rule—they couldn't make themselves reverse over it, just like jumping off a bridge, they kept pulling back, shying away from it—

Robbie pushed himself to one side of the trunk.  _ Get the left rear tire over the edge, do a burn-out. _

They edged out at an angle, hit the brake and gunned the throttle. The rear tires spun in place against the concrete, the screech echoing in the trunk, rubber burning and melting over the painted floor. Robbie reached his foot toward the left side of the trunk, and he couldn't extend his leg, he just couldn't bring himself to cross the ring, and his tires burned and smoked until suddenly he could move. The spell was broken.

_**Go.** _

They stopped, hit reverse. Their hot tires melted to the concrete and jerked them out into the driveway, into the warm sun of a December afternoon.

They checked front and back through mirrors and lights. No other cars, no sign of Dr. Gregory. He must've cut his losses, didn't want to deal with a disappointed client who was also a two-ton muscle car. Yorba Linda was a trackless warren of cheery well-kept suburbs, and Robbie couldn't get a cell signal from inside his trunk. They roared up and down quiet un-lined residential streets until they hit an arterial, took a fast left, headed toward the lowering sun. They wove through traffic, engine howling, while their body bled quietly into their upholstery, breathing fast and shallow.

**Get one of those wire-ties off your leg, put it around your shoulder.**

Robbie slowly disentangled himself from some of the chair fragments. Slid the bindings off his forearms, each movement tearing at the severed muscles in his left shoulder. Pulled up his shin, worked his shoe off, tried to shove the plastic band over his heel.  _ It's not wide enough. _

**Take your shoe-lace out. Tie it around, high up. Under the leather. Lotta knots. Then get your pen. Shove it through the shoe-lace, spin it around 'til it feels like your arm's gonna fall off.**

Robbie used the screen of his phone as a light, and slowly, laboriously, pulled the lacing out of the loops of his Converse. One end had a knot in it that he couldn't undo. His fingers felt numb.

A patrol car flashed its lights and squealed its siren behind them. Eli poured on the gas. As the car lunged forward, Robbie rolled against the back of the trunk, lay on his phone, lost his shoelace.

**Shit. Strap in, I don't feel like getting towed.** Eli skidded around a corner into a residential street, took the first right, backtracked two blocks at ninety miles an hour, slammed the brakes, right again, and pulled out onto the same arterial. Same direction, this time dawdling at the speed limit. The sirens wailed somewhere beside them, within the warren of houses.  **How you comin' on that tourniquet?**

_ Found it. _ Robbie eased himself onto his back, unzipped his jacket. He reached around his left shoulder with the shoe lace, shoved it between jacket and hoodie, and then reached under his armpit, feeling for the end. Too much cloth in his way. He wasn't sure what he had between his fingers. He was so tired. 

Eli spotted a high school, pulled in to the parking lot, and parked behind a scuffed-up Acura. The lot had two exits, three if you counted the garden, which he did, and a decent view of the street.  **Hurry up!** he demanded.  **If we can die, now's the time it'd happen. You die, you're letting that quack win.**

_ I got it, _ Robbie thought. He had the shoelace in his hand. Now what was he—he had to tie it, use his right hand and his teeth, tie it tight right at the shoulder. Tie four or five knots. Then get his pen, the grease marker. He felt his pockets, found it in his right jacket pocket, stuck it through the shoelace and started twisting until the lace started to coil over around itself, tightening painfully— **keep going—** until his fingers went numb— **closer—** until his shoulder hurt like it was caught in a bench clamp, the nerves in his armpit screaming. “How long,” he grunted, gripping his bad shoulder, rolling onto his dead arm. 

**Until you either burn up, or pussy out on me and go to a hospital,** Eli replied.  **Feel your pulse, inside your arm just past the tourniquet. Anything?**

Robbie pushed his fingers into his sleeve, into the mess of blood.  _ No.  _

**Perfect. It's all uphill from here.**

They waited in the lot as the sun crept lower in the west, the other cars pulled out and drove home. Robbie's shoulder never stopped hurting, but he couldn't feel his left arm at all, and the inside of the trunk smelled like blood and meat. His heart slowed slightly, his lips stopped tingling, his head cleared from the drugs and shock, but he was thirsty, desperate with it, and he'd have popped the trunk and staggered into the driver's seat to get himself a water, the whole case of water bottles, except he didn't want to leave. He didn't want anyone to see a bloody, pale teenager in a school parking lot, and more importantly, he wanted his steel around himself. He hadn't realized how safe being the Rider made him feel, until he couldn't change anymore.

He thought about what he'd almost let happen. He'd almost let Dr. Gregory kill him. Gabe would go back in the system, he'd be devastated, but...Gabe wasn't the shy, spacey kid he'd been two years ago. It would take time, but Gabe would recover. He would. He had friends. Robbie wasn't his whole world anymore. If Robbie really had to die, Gabe would still have people who loved him.

Robbie didn't want to die.

He didn't want to turn into Eli, but he didn't want to die. He wanted to be himself. Maybe that was selfish of him, but as he lay in the dark of his own trunk in a pool of his own blood, he ground his teeth in rage, because he didn't deserve any of this. He hadn't deserved to die last year, he hadn't asked Eli to bring him back, he didn't want powers, and he didn't deserve some hack from the yellow pages putting him down because he couldn't tell what he was made out of.

**There's a chunk of magical machete still in you,** Eli said after a while.  **Dig it out.**

Robbie rolled onto his back and gritted his teeth, stuck his fingers through the slit in his jacket, deep into the wet meaty hole. The skin was numb. The muscle felt dead. He ran into something hard and thin, wished he still had his multitool; it was slippery and he needed the pliers. When he wiggled it back and forth, it ached, deep in the bone where the tourniquet couldn't reach.

It popped loose and he held it between two fingers. About the size of a snap-in box-cutter blade, and just as sharp.

He wondered how many innocent people Dr. Gregory had written off. How much blood this steel had spilled. His heart raced, stronger. He took a deep breath, engine fumes hot and sweet in the back of his throat as he exhaled. “ _ Fuck him. _ ”

Eli started the car and revved the engine, then let it idle, the blower hissing, the motor warming slowly. Robbie pressed his bloody hand flat against the trunk lid, where the black paint soaked up the sun's heat. He was so thirsty, his mouth was so dry. He worked his tongue to get saliva flowing, and came up with oil. His heavy engine's idle vibrated his trunk. Fumes filled the small space, covering the smell of drying blood and dying muscle. He let the pen untwist out of the tourniquet. Blood pumped out of the wound again. Dr. Gregory had tried to kill him; he probably killed a lot of people. And he'd bilked Robbie out of five hundred dollars.

The engine roared, started knocking, hard painful pings from within one of the cylinders. Gasket blew. Robbie cried out, his voice shrill, metallic. Fuel pump kept running, pumping gas into the sparking engine compartment, where it caught with a gasp of flame. Fire chased along the undercarriage, ran through the exhaust pipes. The tank grew hotter, hit the flashpoint. The exploding vapors blew a hole out of the tank, jetting fire into the cabin. Gasoline dripped, burning, onto the concrete under the trunk, and Robbie was dying, he was suffocating and burning himself, his curse was consuming his body, and all he could think was,  _ come on, hurry the fuck up,  _ _**I'm ready.** _

The vapors in his lungs, the oil on his tongue caught fire. It poured out of him, charred his throat, cooked his heart. He was dead, but still aware, still in his body, urging it,  _**burn, burn, stop holding me back,** _ and then his blood was no longer blood but fuel, the rest of his flesh caught, and what had been Robbie Reyes dissolved into ash and steam, flowed into the steel of the trunk, hauled itself out into the driver's seat.

The Rider slammed into reverse and jerked out of the parking lot. Roared onto the road heading east, back the way they'd come. Phased right through a cop car in front of them on the road, opened a portal, crashed through darkness and landed in front of that cheery brick house in Yorba Linda, with the sign out front and the garage door lying in crumpled sheets all down the driveway.

He snarled, gunned the motor, and rammed the front wall. His front bumper deformed briefly, a scream of metal, but the bricks yielded. He reversed, picked a new spot, rammed the house again. Got a good head of speed, charged right through the living room and out the other side, onto the manicured back lawn. Grass steamed and burned under his tires. He reversed again, scattering bricks, knocking down interior walls, shattering glass. The flames that streamed up from his tires and blower snaked into the attic as the ceiling began to crumble, and the house caught fire; he turned his attention to the garage, just wood-frame here, the fire caught faster. He hauled himself out through his roof, swinging his chains, but Dr. Gregory was gone, all his boxes and cases were gone, and there were just the painted symbols on the floor to destroy. And destroy he did; he whirled the chains straight up-and-down like a circular saw, gouged into the concrete until he could see the sand under the foundation. “ _**I want my money back,** _ ” he roared, but there was no one to hear him.

When the house was a pile of smoking rubble, he ported back to East LA and snuffed out. Robbie clung to the steering wheel for a long moment, pressing the hard v-shaped mark on his forehead against the hub. He gripped his healed shoulder through unmarred leather and cotton. No bloodstains. The only reason he could tell anything had happened was that his shoe was still in the trunk. The sun was going down. It was eight in the evening. He hadn't picked Gabe up from school.

He gasped, patted himself down. Popped the trunk and ran out to retrieve his phone. Missed messages popped up on the screen, texts and voicemails from Gabe's teaching aide at the middle school, from the school nurse, from Mrs. Valenzuela. Gabe had called him. Gabe had called him repeatedly.

Robbie called Gabe's Jitterbug. It rang and rang and went to voicemail. He dialed again. The phone started beeping as it rang; he checked; it was an incoming call. Gabe. How to cancel a call? Green button said “Accept” but it winked out as he reached for it. Now both calls went to voicemail. Robbie called again, and this time Gabe picked up.

“Robbie?” He sounded so scared. 

“Gabe! Where are you? I'm coming. I'm back. I need to know where you are, I'll come get you.”

“Robbie! I'm—” Gabe stopped suddenly. Robbie heard him breathing over the line, wet. Rustling of cloth against the microphone, more breathing. 

“Gabe, it's me, I'm here,” Robbie said, squeezing his phone case. 

The phone rustled again. He heard Gabe's voice, fainter, too far from the phone, howling, “No! Noooo!”

“Gabe!” His lungs burned. He set the phone down on the passenger seat, afraid it might blow up if he kept it in his hand. “Gabe! Where are you? What's happening?”

“Mine!” he heard Gabe screaming. “Give it back!” Robbie suddenly remembered that, when push came to shove, Gabe was not above threatening to bite people.

“Give him—give it back,” Robbie yelled. “This is Roberto Reyes! Give my brother his phone back!”

More rustling. Robbie poked at the phone, carefully, turned the volume up. He heard Gabe sniffling again.

“I'm here. It's me. I came back. I'm so sorry, I got stuck, I couldn't make it back to pick you up.” He waited, heart pounding. 

“Got stuck?” Gabe asked, unsteady.

“I almost—I couldn't—” He'd almost died. Then he'd been the Rider. **You were having too much fun.** “I got lost,” he said at last. “But I know where I am now. I want to come take you home. I love you. Where are you?”

“I'm at Mrs. Valenzuela's,” Gabe said, and Robbie started the car. 

“Hang on, buddy. I'll see you soon.”

“Robbie's coming,” Gabe said, and then he hung up.

As they screeched out of the alley, Eli set to work sketching a convoluted story about a job interview, a wrong turn, a dead battery, and an encounter with the police.  **Got to keep up that trustworthy reputation, kid.**

Gabe hugged him when he got in the door, and Robbie squeezed back, burying his face in his hair, pressing him to his chest,  _ I'm sorry, I'm sorry. _

 

* * *

 

He got a text two days later, unknown number, sent at seven in the afternoon while he was eating chicken soup with Gabe.

- _ ¿Cómo fue el exorcismo? _ It read. And then:

_-Los jefes estan preocupados que los federales descubrirá lo nuestro_

- _ Han apagado la electricidad _

_ -Trataran robar _ _ nuestros teléfonos _

_-Debemos robar una camioneta, ir al estación de autobuses_

_-Todos estos americanos son criminales, por eso tambien debemos ser criminales_

_-Feliz navidad_

**Well,** Eli said, smug.  **Looks like you tried to get rid of me a little too soon.**

Robbie groaned. Gabe looked up from his magazine. It was hand-stapled, printed on powder-blue copy paper: a street zine the local punk bands put out. Robbie didn't have thirty dollars for a nice set of marker pens, but he could spare fifty cents for a magazine from a kid in a studded jacket standing on the street corner. Gabe still had safety pins on his jeans from when he'd been hanging out with Mateo. Robbie wasn't sure how he was going to run them through the washer. “What's wrong?” Gabe asked.

Robbie stared down at his phone, grinding his teeth. Gabe watched him, concerned.

“There's some people stuck in a bad place and they need me to drive them somewhere safer,” he said at last. 

“Go do it, Robbie!” Gabe exclaimed. “You're so nice, you're my hero!” He bounced in his chair, stared at Robbie expectantly.

“We're not done with dinner,” Robbie said.

“I'll eat it all, Robbie, I promise! I'm a teenager, I can brush my teeth and do my homework—” 

“Okay,” Robbie said, composing a new text. “I might be gone a few hours. Don't open the door for anyone.”

“I know, Robbie!” Gabe took a big spoonful of chicken soup. “So tasty, I'm eating my soup. Bye, Robbie!”

Robbie stood, got his jacket, sent a text.

- _ No robes ningun coche! Voy a ayudar usteds _

He squinted at it.  **Su español fuera una mierda.**

_Whatever._

- _ Puedo llavartes al aeropuerto o a guatemala o qualcier lugar en google maps _

**The fuck is that word supposed to be?**

_Cualquier?_

**Wow.**

_-Estare ayi en un momento_

- _ *cualquier _

Robbie locked the door, headed out into the breezy December night to the car parked at the curb. They headed out a few blocks, burned up on the fly, dropped through a portal and landed in the frozen cornfield near the trailers. Snuffed out and marched through the cold and dark to the trailers. Texted the unknown number. Pablo and Marvin met him outside.

“Put a hat on,” Pablo said, handing him a stretchy orange knit cap. 

Robbie jammed it over his ears, shivering. “I can fit five passengers in my car, if you share the middle seat,” he said. “If you really need to, I can help you break into a van and start it, but I don't think you want that much attention on you.”

“You'll have to make a lot of trips,” Pablo said. He looked over his shoulder at Marvin. “Can you really go to Guatemala?”

Robbie held up his phone. “Anywhere I have a good picture,” he said. “It'll be an interesting ride. First, bus station. How far away is it?”

“Fifty miles,” Pablo said. He held up his own phone, showed Robbie the map. 

_**Ugh.** _

_That's a lot of gas._

**Small-town cops, got nothing better to do than pull you over for going ten miles over the speed limit. Hey! We're out of our stomping grounds, we can kill cops with impunity here!**

“Change of plan,” Robbie said. “Get everyone who's leaving out to the field. We'll do the bus station first, ferry you all over five at a time, get this done in half an hour. Any groups going real far? Ten people headed to Kansas or anything like that?”

“I'll ask Sergio,” Pablo said, texting. 

Marvin stepped around him toward Robbie. His eyes were wide, concerned. “ _ How _ are you moving us?” he asked.

“Ghost car,” Robbie said. “I'm a Ghost Rider, remember. I can help you. As long as you're not afraid of fire.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lo siento. None of the Spanish in this chapter has been examined by a native Spanish speaker. My Spanish is crap. I used Google Translate and Reverso Context.
> 
> Pablo's texts:  
> "How'd the exorcism go? The bosses are worried the Feds are going to find out about us. They've shut off the electricity. Tried to steal our phones. We have to steal a van, go to the bus station. All these Americans are criminals, so we have to be criminals, too. Merry Christmas."
> 
> Robbie's texts:  
> "Don't steal any cars! I'm coming to help you. I can take you to the airport or to Guatemala or anywhere on Google Maps. I'll be there in a moment."

**Author's Note:**

> Names have been changed to avoid being sued by the guilty, but Google "ohio eggs human trafficking" and you will recognize the egg farm and everyone involved in the trafficking scheme.  
> "Jack DeCuster"s real life counterpart had sold the farm to another company at the time of this trafficking scandal, but in this fictionalized version, he had transferred ownership to his son. The real farm is no longer a family company (not that that has helped matters any).  
> To my knowledge, no-one actually died at the real "Trillian Farms," but if someone were to die working in a chicken farm, this is how it would happen.


End file.
